Blog | Data Management | February 23, 2023 | 3 min read

Embracing Customer Profiling and Data Management

By Actian Corporation

#Data Integration #Data Management #DataCloud
fingers showing customer data and management

By Actian Corporation

#Data Integration #Data Management #DataCloud
In this post:

Defining Exceptional Service

Organizations always aim to give their customers the best experiences. There are several interpretations of what constitutes good and excellent service, and sometimes these terms are used interchangeably. However, many companies fail to achieve exceptional service because they do not understand their customers. 

Delivering any level of service requires that we anticipate what the customer is expecting. Sometimes they do not know what they want – so businesses use insights to predict what might be most useful to them. There have been many good companies with great products that have failed because the customer experience was terrible. The need to understand customer expectations and deliver products and services that meet those expectations is what defines exceptional service.  

Profiling and Managing Data

To fulfill the needs of our customers before and after a purchase, we must gather all available data. This data must be structured in a manner that is tailored to the customer and the service. This requires an understanding of marketing, transaction, mobile, and organizational service data. Some examples of marketing data would be the customer’s name, demographic information, age, financial characteristics, and online activities. Transaction data can give us a deeper understanding of their buying preferences and behavior. Mobile data from devices like phones, which have sensors, may show us where the customer is located, their distance from us, as well as their pulse and motion. To maximize the effectiveness of the data, we must combine the marketing, transaction, and mobile data with the organizational service data. This includes service, applications, infrastructure, platform, and capabilities. The data must be sourced from a variety of places such as cloud, on-premises, and IoT devices, including third-party sources. It is essential for accurate customer profiling to collect data from all sources. 

Knowing your customers better requires you to surface patterns and information that help paint a picture of who our customers are in any moment of time. Understanding buying habits creates the ability to use analytics to predict customer behavior and move them through the journey. Predictive behaviors based on historical data analysis can inform decisions and these decisions can be used to influence and create trust with the consumer. 

Enhancing Data and Decision Support

To enhance data for profiling decision support, first, we collect the data from as many sources as possible. Across all clouds, on-premises, and any other data sources. Enterprise-wide data collection capabilities are a must-have  to capture the customer as completely as possible and profile them for your services or products.  

The data must be analyzed quickly so that you are engaging your customer with the right message at the right time. Everyone is mobile, so as data is collected, you need the ability to communicate and influence your customer as quickly as possible.  

The more you understand your collected customer-related data, the better you can use automation, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other emerging technologies effectively. These emerging capabilities all begin with having a clear data strategy, the technology to support the strategy, and the enterprise’s daily data collection operations.  

Discover how the Actian Data Platform can empower your data-driven enterprise with its data management and data integration solutions.  Actian Data Platform delivers unparalleled analytics performance for the data-driven enterprise, no matter where your data resides. Built-in services connect and orchestrate data movement across all your applications, so you can make those real-time connections with your customers.  

Blog | Data Analytics | February 21, 2023 | 5 min read

9 Essential Blog Articles to Help You Know Your Customer Better

By Actian Corporation

#Data Analytics #Data Integration #Data Management
globe showing screens with articles and information about knowing your customers better

By Actian Corporation

#Data Analytics #Data Integration #Data Management
In this post:

Competition for customers is more intense than ever. And landing customers is only half the battle. Keeping them happy is the other half. Creating customers for life entails nurturing relationships and predicting changing needs, or risk losing customers to competitors. 

Innovative marketers understand the importance of knowing their customers so they can meet their needs and exceed their expectations. The barrier to achieving this often lies in an organization’s inability to easily integrate and utilize all relevant data to build comprehensive customer profiles.  

Add in the problem of a growing number of data and analytic tools, causing silos instead of enabling holistic customer views, and it’s easy to see why businesses have difficulty in truly knowing their customers. That’s why having the right platform is essential.   

We’ve collected the following articles in one place – offering expert advice and proven approaches that empower marketing teams to better know their customers and deliver the right experiences: 

Personalize CX

Personalization is the key to superior customer experiences. This presents a stark challenge for today’s businesses—deliver customized experiences across every interaction, or the customer may jump to a competitor that does. Find out why data-driven personalization can be the difference between “a customer for a moment and a customer for life.”

Connect Data for Easier CX

Ensuring consistent and outstanding customer experiences can be tricky because data is often spread out across disparate systems or hidden away in silos. Data must be integrated into a single platform and easy to use across the organization to deliver optimal value. See how connected data makes CX easier and more predictable. 

Prioritize CX

Creating an effective customer experience strategy is one critical step in an organization’s mission to connect with customers in meaningful ways. The strategy must include a way to understand the many dimensions of the customer and build 360-degree views at scale. Discover how prioritizing a CX strategy can drive business growth. 

Solve CX Challenges for Small Businesses

Engaging customers is business-critical for organizations of all sizes, but small and medium businesses face unique challenges. That’s because they have fewer technology resources to integrate all relevant data from all sources. Learn how the right platform lets businesses, even those with less than 1,000 employees, solve CX pain points and ensure success. 

See the Relationship Between CX and Cloud Data Integration

One downside of having so many customer experience tools now available is that they lead to data silos. Barriers to data integration lead to blind spots in the organization. Here’s a great read on how a cloud data platform offers a single solution for integrating and transforming all data, including data stored in the cloud, to tailor customer experiences and reach desired outcomes. 

Understand the Importance of a CX Strategy

Taking a proactive approach to customer experiences often requires less time and effort than reacting to negative feedback. Customers need positive interactions for the good to outweigh the bad. Delivering these interactions is increasingly important because unhappy customers are far more likely to write reviews and be vocal than happy customers. See how the right strategy can help guide the customer experience. 

Boost CX Through IoT and Edge Computing

Businesses are using more of the data they create at the edge—outside of the traditional data center or cloud infrastructure. Edge computing is revolutionizing the way businesses collect, process, and store data, which is opening doors to better customer experiences. Find out how data from edge computing and internet of things (IoT) devices will transform the way businesses and customers interact.

Deliver Impactful CX

Ensuring the right customer experiences starts with having accurate data that’s easy to access, manage, and use. “For businesses today, that data is the lifeblood for CX,” according to a blog. Too often, data management challenges limit access to current data, which negatively impacts customer experiences. See how to solve the challenge and modernize CX.

Increase Loyalty and Brand Sentiment

Providing the right experience to every customer, during every interaction, can be tricky. No surprise there. But what may be surprising is that data is not easy to access at many businesses. Easily accessible data can mitigate customer churn and enable superior experiences, among other benefits. Follow a data-driven approach to up-level customer experiences, build loyalty, and boost customer sentiment.  

 Start Delivering Enhanced Customer Experiences Today

As the articles point out, data optimization is essential to delight customers with impactful experiences. Businesses must be able to easily connect, manage, and analyze their data in a consistent way to understand customers, then predict and nurture their journeys. We hope these provide concrete examples for you to aid you in your journey in delivering the best in your customer experiences. 

The Actian Data Platform simplifies data usage. It allows marketers and others throughout the business to utilize data to ensure strategies are successful. Organizations can reimagine experiences that meet fast-changing customer needs and accurately determine the next best offer, while building and sustaining customer loyalty.  

Blog | Data Integration | February 21, 2023 | 5 min read

Ethics and Data Integration

By Actian Corporation

#Big Data #Data Integration
person researching ethics and ai data integration

By Actian Corporation

#Big Data #Data Integration

I collect articles on data integration. I do this for my ongoing education, as well as to gain new and interesting perspectives on a technology that I’ve been involved with since the early 90s.

One of the most thought-provoking articles was a recent article by Anne Buff, discussing the ethics behind data, including big data and data integration. “There has been a lot of hype around the introduction of social media data and big data to the worlds of data integration and master data management. After all, isn’t more data – capable of helping us identify and understand our customers better – invaluable to the business? Perhaps, but along with its infinite value could come some highly unexpected, extensive costs and liabilities if not handled appropriately.”

As Anne points out, as we integrate external data sources with other data sources, we must certainly be aware of the governing laws and regulations in how we handle that data. What is missing, however, is an understanding of the responsibility of data management with ethics in mind. We must do no harm as we keep and leverage data from many different sources, including our own. “We are consistently seeing more news reports about brand-damaging situations companies are facing because the ethical implications of their actions were just not considered.”

Most of us don’t think about ethical responsibility around data integration and the general use of data. These days, to have data is to have understanding, and to have understanding is to have power, and to have power there is a potential for abuse.

Data integration has always been a powerful tool to drive understanding, typically intra-enterprise. By having applications and databases that share data, enterprises can react upon near-perfect information.

For instance, the ability for a sales order system to check a customer’s credit rating, and dynamically adjust the price based upon the risk of not getting paid. Moreover, the ability for the sales information to automatically inform the production systems to begin building and delivering a product, then the information moves to accounting, and perhaps to a data warehouse. All of this occurs within seconds.  Back in the day, we called this the “real-time enterprise.”

Today we have a few new concepts today that make data even more powerful, including:

  • The rise of big data systems that allow for the easy analysis of both structured and unstructured data with quick response times.
  • Better and more scalable data integration technology that’s able to replicate data across systems and databases.
  • The rise of cloud-delivered data from many different sources, including social media, government, and commercial organizations.
  • An increasing desire to leverage this information to enhance revenue.

So, a well-integrated enterprise can actually have access to many different data points, both inside and outside of the enterprise. The ability to see that data, and place it into context, provides insights not available in the past, such as the ability to determine human attributes, even if the direct data is not there, such as marriage status, sexual orientation, income, criminal records, political leanings, credit, hobbies, affiliations, etc. .

Much of this data is derived from seemingly innocuous data, such as posting a picture of your new motorcycle on Facebook, or stating your support for gay marriage on twitter. Even if you don’t put this information out on social networks, certain conclusions can be reached based upon whom you allow into your virtual social circles, or by tracking your smart phone. The ability to draw these conclusions from data is the core concept behind data science, which is a rising discipline.

Other more business-oriented sophisticated data analysis can occur as well. An example would be the ability to determine if a company will meet their quarterly numbers based upon thousands of unrelated data points, and trading on that information. Or, another example would be government entities using data gathered with GPS systems leveraged by motorists to issue speeding tickets. The list goes on.

So, what are the ethics around using data, and gathering data using data integration technologies and approaches? As we discussed above, with data comes knowledge, and with knowledge comes power, and with power comes responsibility.

As we learn how to leverage data to understand more about the data that we manage, as well as leverage other outside data to define a better pattern of context, we actually have to ask the question: What do we really need to understand to support the business? What information is relevant? What are the legalities around management of certain data? What information is too invasive?

This does not mean we just protect the company from criticism, or avoid PR issues. This is about a fundamental set of policies that guide the use of information that has become far more complete and detailed than it was just a few years ago. This is about the ethical use of data, and the continued ability to leverage data integration approaches and technologies for the good of the company.

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