5 Reasons to Unify Customer Data
Data integration can transform your business
Everything organizations do to retain and expand customer revenue, from tracking health to identifying additional value, is made simpler through the unification of customer data into one place.
Why integrate your customer data?
Improved collaboration
Different departments often use different platforms. For example, Sales may take notes in a relationship management platform, while Finance uses spreadsheets and Support tracks everything in a ticketing system. These teams will then, by default, have access to different data about customers, and each will use that disparate and one-sided data to make decisions related to how their teams interact with customers. Bringing all of the data housed in those different systems together into a single view ensures that every department collaborates based on a comprehensive picture of customer health.
No data left behind
Data repositories only occasionally used or forgotten lead to missed correlations and insights. Imagine, for instance, that the team responsible for customer training tracks completions of various modules, but the data is limited. Data integration ensures that important correlations aren’t overlooked, even if the data is sparse or messy.
Accountability for data maintenance
When all eyes are on an integrated data dashboard, roles responsible for updating each source feel a greater weight of responsibility to ensure accuracy and up-to-dateness. For example, if key contact information or contract dates are missing, the organization will notice. Or if qualitative data - tickets, emails, transcripts - haven’t been loaded into the CRM, the need for doing so will be clear.
Unbiased, data-driven recommendations
The ability to see everything from support ticket severity to product logins to training completion to NPS responses all in one place reduces the framing bias that puts undue weight on one set of data. Decision-makers can see a full picture of customer health, versus a narrow, potentially misleading slice.
Ease!
You know that feeling of having to log into three or more sites (all with unique logins) to accomplish a single task? Data integration into a single platform eliminates that challenge. Users can log into a single source to view and take action on customer data. It saves time, frustration, and resources!
How to approach data integration
The move from fragmented data to integration is a journey.
The first step: audit and understand what platforms are being used to manage customer data - everything from contract data, to account assignments, to product usage, to customer satisfaction ratings. Start with the most obvious and data-rich sources, like a CRM, and add on from there.
To integrate sources, look for integration capabilities, where systems can be linked together to share data back and forth. Trying to do this manually would require a massive lift, so the more you can rely on built in integrations or APIs the better.
Quantitative data alone only tells part of the story. If possible, including qualitative data to understand context and sentiment will provide immense value.
involve.ai can take the lift out of data integration for your organization. Our Data Science Consultants can assist in the consideration of data sources and the mapping of fragmented data types into a standardized, unified view. And our first-of-its-kind, no-code data mapping tool makes integrating sources simple and transparent. Not to mention, once your customer data is integrated, we can analyze everything from sentiment to weight of impact to help you predict churn and expansion opportunities and empower your employees to take proactive action.