Forging Meaningful Customer Connections Starts with Harmonized Data

Building a customer company continues to be a critical aspect of every organization’s strategic priorities. Economic headwinds continue to persist well into 2023. To build durable, resilient, and relevant businesses, it is critical to stay connected with customers and to meet them where they are.

But how does a company accomplish this in today’s hyper connected environment? 

To put it into perspective, research shows that in Singapore, larger companies have an average of 1,064 different applications to run their business - that’s 1,064 potential versions of a single customer and 1,064 records about each and every customer. Instead of a unified, 360-degree view of the customer, you have fragmented glimpses and disconnected experiences. 

The volume of data that companies generate continues to grow exponentially and is expected to more than double by 2026. According to Salesforce research, almost one-third of business leaders in Singapore are already overwhelmed by the amount of data that exists today.

In this all-digital world, milliseconds matter more, especially with the petabytes of data generated from our always-on smartphones, connected cars, home security systems, and many other devices.

Disjointed experiences waste the customer’s time, increase support costs, and don’t elicit customer loyalty. As customer expectations rise, connecting and extracting value from data in real time will become a key pillar of businesses’ growth strategies.

Meaningful customer relationships with harmonized data

Having a unified and real-time view of every customer, at scale, is central to forging meaningful and connected customer relationships. To build a customer company, you need to meet your customers where they are and know who they are, based on the preferences and experiences they are consistently sharing with you across the various channels that they engage with your brand on. 

By breaking down data silos and using real-time customer insights, companies can power their sales, marketing, and commerce interactions, and deliver relevant and tailored experiences, while saving time and money.

Our research shows that 72% of consumers in Singapore will remain loyal to companies that offer a more personalized experience, with 57% of consumers expecting companies to react instantly with up-to-date information when consumers are interacting between departments.

The combination of AI + Data + CRM is reshaping industries entirely. Companies need to bring together data across systems real time, build relevant automations, and power AI driven experiences to fortify customer loyalty and improve customer experiences.

Let’s take a minute to consider retail experiences. 

Due to the macroeconomic uncertainties, many are seeing a downward trend in retail demand. As mentioned earlier, harmonized data is crucial in helping leaders make more informed decisions for their customers and their businesses to build customer loyalty. 

Retailer Lotus’s, which runs Thailand and Malaysia’s supermarkets and hypermarkets, unified data from multiple sources into a single customer data platform to have a holistic view of their 9 million customers on file. This has allowed them to better engage with their customers by streamlining the onboarding experience and offering tailored loyalty programs.

It also has in place marketing automation systems that detect abandoned online shopping carts, triggering a series of follow-up actions that encourage them to complete their purchases. Furthermore, these automations ensure that Lotus’s re-engages with customers that have shopped online in the past. All these enhancements help to boost e-commerce growth. 

For automotive businesses, being able to unify vehicle data, retail data, and customer data into a single, real-time profile for every customer enables them to build personalized experiences at every touch point. Automobile manufacturer Ford for one, has pooled together its customer data from multiple business units and business teams into a single source of truth.

With data housed under one roof and available in real-time, Ford is able to activate it across every channel and match customers to engagement behavior. This empowers them to deliver a connected experience throughout a customer’s shopping journey, from purchase, accessories, onboarding, to maintenance. By adding value to each and every customer interaction, harmonized data drives customer loyalty and trust for the business. 

Eliminating cost and complexity

With the power of AI + Data + CRM, companies can now create seamless, connected, and hyper-personalized customer experiences better than ever before. And as emerging technologies like generative AI become mainstream, the impact on each and every engagement is palpable.

Companies can now connect their proprietary data to an AI model of their choosing and use natural-language prompts to generate content that continuously adapts to changing customer information and needs in real time. All of this in a trusted environment to ensure no data leakage occurs and companies can make the best decision with their own customers data to strengthen customer experiences and customer loyalty. 

Having a golden record in a trusted environment that captures everything about a customer in real-time across every interaction eliminates the cost and complexity of building a single view of the customer, making it easier and more achievable for companies to take action on their data to deliver the value that customers need.

Building a strong data culture is key to maximizing the potential of information and equipping teams to make smart decisions. Having a customer data platform that acts as a single source of truth is integral to driving business resilience, meaningful customer engagement, and future growth.

This post was written by Vivek Mahapatra, Technology Evangelist, ASEAN, Salesforce. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.

Image credit: iStockphoto/oatawa