How to Leverage Your Data to Drive Business Efficiency

Money. Most business decisions revolve around the need to either make more of it or protect it. However, in uncertain economic times where investment slows down, it becomes even more important to focus on doing more with what you already have, otherwise known as driving efficiency.One critical avenue to driving business efficiency is to maximize the use of one of an organization’s most valuable assets—its customer data. Insights from customer data can be used to better understand customer behaviors, market trends, business successes, and business failures. It can also be leveraged to better engage customers in a way that is most relevant for them.

Three Common Business Efficiency Challenges–And How To Solve Them

Our recent Customer Data Maturity Study showed that while most companies understand the benefits of using customer data, multiple practical challenges can keep these organizations from actually leveraging their data in the most efficient way. These challenges can range from lack of an overall customer data strategy to more tactical issues around data collection, analysis, and storage, as well as privacy and security. So how can you ensure you can extract the most value from your customer data, while improving business efficiency across the entire organization?Enter the Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud. The integrated suite of cloud-based customer data platform solutions empowers sales, marketing and operations teams to collect, analyze and activate data across the entire tech stack with one up-to-date customer profile. With Customer Data Cloud, your company can easily tackle the most common business efficiency and data strategy challenges.

Challenge #1: Disconnected and Disjointed Data Sources

Organizations collect data in endless areas: transaction data, behavior data, demographic data, activity data, and more. They collect this data across brands, business units, and regions. Each dataset is likely in a different format, different language, from a different source, and sits in a different system. The effort required to stitch this data together to create useful insights is manual, time consuming, and expensive.Imagine eliminating the time required to ingest, cleanse, unify, and consolidate data into an actionable view. How many people are currently managing those activities and how much time are they spending? What incremental value-add projects or initiatives could they focus on if those activities were streamlined, automated, and seamlessly orchestrated in one place?With its ability to natively ingest any data source from any format, language, or system, Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud enables organizations to do just that, creating enormous efficiencies for data engineers, data scientists, and data analysts. The end result is an efficiently created single customer view that can be used by all business functions to drive their individual priorities.

Challenge #2: Inability to Cleanly Consolidate All Data

Let’s assume that an organization has found a way to successfully solve challenge #1 and connect all of their disconnected data sources. Is that customer view clean? Are all duplicate profiles removed? Are unknown and known identities resolved and unified into a full profile? Data cleanliness, consolidation, and unification is another time consuming, complicated, and manual process that torpedoes business efficiency by burning valuable hours from expensive data engineers, scientists, and analysts.Not only does unclean data drive suboptimal employee productivity, but it also impacts how efficiently all functions of an organization interact with customers. A few examples of this are below:

• Marketers may be including duplicate profiles in their campaigns leading to wasted ad spend
• Customer service representatives are wasting valuable time looking for the correct “John Smith” profile when answering various requests
• Logistics teams have an incorrect view into the total number of customers and prospects leading to potential inventory shortages or overages

Treasure Data Customer Data Cloud enables organizations to configure robust workflows for data cleaning, standardizing, enriching, and unifying. The entire organization is now working from a shared, accessible, and secure customer data foundation that allows insights to be surfaced in numerous ways, for numerous use cases. Efficiency is not only driven here by the reduction in manpower required to do such tasks, but also by the ability to reduce downstream financial waste throughout the organization.

Challenge #3: Generic Customer Segmentation and Content

Marketing is the lifeblood of an organization’s ability to drive awareness, ultimately impacting all stages of the customer funnel: acquisition, growth, and retention. However, in the face of economic pressures, marketers and their budgets have come under close scrutiny—asked to deliver on mission-critical objectives with less. Optimizing their spend to increase marketing ROI is a critical way organizations can drive business efficiency.The most common challenge to achieving this optimization is when a generic message is broadcast to generalized segments and audiences. Organizations are spending money marketing to audiences who may never buy for a litany of reasons rather than focusing the marketing investment where it will have the biggest impact. Every customer wants to receive content personalized to them on the channel they prefer at the time they prefer, but organizations struggle to deliver this perfect experience.

Treasure Data’s Customer Data Cloud includes predictive modeling to help marketers build smart customer segmentation based on things like propensity to buy or likelihood of churn. With a complete view of the customer across all channels and powerful journey orchestration tools, marketers can drive purposeful activations with the right message, in the right channel, at the right time. With A/B testing to ensure campaign success, there’s room for innovation before committing large chunks of budget. Generating a larger return on ad spend can allow for re-allocation of limited budget dollars to other areas.Efficiency is always a business goal, but when money becomes tight, it moves to the very top of any priority list. Let Treasure Data help you do more with what you have by connecting your disparate data sources and cleanly consolidating that data into a single customer view to help you deliver connected customer experiences.