At the core

We have moved from business relations built on products or services and transactions to business relations focused on the customer and on interactions and events. Now, business is a series of real time events.

This shift put customer data at the core of an organization’s strategy and more critical than ever.

Customer data has evolved itself, from a statical set of identification data, to a dynamic and a broad spectrum of information that will now include all sorts of quantitative, descriptive, qualitative data about the customer.

Managing customer data is now about understanding your customers and their goals and how business can best address those needs and gain a competitive edge.

Starting a series of articles on topics related with managing customer data, I will first focus on how managing customer data can improve the customer life cycle, how managing data can help to understand the customer’s journey and drive business across the customer life cycle stages.

Most organizations capture customer data through different tools and systems. Managing this data is a challenge, either due to the volume of customers or to constantly evolving personal and transactional information. Enforcing that this data must be managed to maintain its quality and enable it for future uses.

Effective customer data management will enable the organizations to increase its sales, to increase the efficiency of its business processes and to ensure compliance and data security by enabling the generation of reliable customer insights.

Customer data, being at the core of the business process has the potential to enable the identification of behaviour patterns, to identify the customer tendencies and detect significant changes and to create the perspective of “market of one” in the customer relationship.

Effectively managed customer data can have a significant impact on achieving the objectives on each of these three types of customer engagement stages:

• Customer acquisition – bringing new customers onboard and maintain a consistent influx of new customers.

• Customer engagement – deepening of the relationship and keeping an aligned customer-centric approach, focusing on long-term interactions, encouraging customer loyalty and advocacy.

• Customer retention – reducing customer defections, increasing repeat customers, and providing and extracting more value from the existing customer base.

These objectives are achieved through different solutions and technological approaches, but they all have one common dependency – Customer data.

Managing the customer data journey will enable transforming the organization’s customer-generated data into actionable information, providing the best results from the customer journey.