7 Steps To Unify Data and Create Connected Experiences Customers Expect

All customers are important, but not all are the same — some generate more business than others. As part of your prioritization process, identify the customer segments that bring the most value to your organization, quantify why this segment is important to the business, and build customer journeys around them.

Common segment splits we see often include: high spender, frequent shopper, or high influencer — but ultimately, these segments are unique to your business. Next, spend time understanding the journey these segments have with your brand. This exercise will reveal gaps in the customer journey and show you where you can make organizational improvements to make sure your marketing, commerce, sales, and service teams have a 360-degree view of your customer.

Map the critical points in that journey to develop your framework, then identify the corresponding employee touch points enabling the experience. Employees rely on insights to deliver the right experience, so ask them what’s working and what’s not to understand the most common pain points they deal with when engaging with these segments of customers.

To execute your strategy and campaigns, create an agile team of various departments and channels, start with the teams who require synergy based on priority use cases.

One of our client’s top use cases was to align email marketing messages with authentic experiences on their website. To achieve this, they asked an agile marketing team to sit within the engineering organization. Team members felt like they were stepping into a new world, but it gave marketing an easier way to partner with their technical counterparts to bring to life new, effective experiences across web and mobile. Together, they implemented a connected customer experience strategy.

Resist the urge to organize teams by platform and begin grouping resources by customer experience goals. You will create a collaborative environment, increase speed to market, and save costs when you break down team silos.

Providing better, more connected customer experiences often requires many resources, so it’s important to show quick returns on investment by measuring performance and impact.

Align on the top KPIs across channels and audit critical touchpoints in your customer journey framework to uncover measurement gaps. Standardize naming conventions for data collection across channels, such as defining a unified data layer that uses the same names and data types, to ensure everyone understands your new marketing data model. Everyone needs to have the same understanding of the KPIs being tracked and where to go for the single source of truth about the KPI; for example, how do we define and track a conversion, an impression within each channel, what an interaction means, etcetera.

Begin collecting relevant data as soon as possible to ensure you can use measurements to determine the impact and prioritize your roadmap. As you do so, evaluate your ability to identify and socialize results quickly so you can optimize the internal process for improving the customer experience.

You should be able to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of each customer experience. Still, you may also use other key metrics, such as improvements in net promoter scores and customer engagement. Use the data you’ve collected to measure how easy it is for customers to do what they want and prove impact.

MuleSoft’s 2020 Connectivity Benchmark Report uncovered that the average enterprise uses about 900 different applications, but only 28% are connected. How can your teams come together to serve the customer cohesively when data is in dozens, or potentially even hundreds, of systems?

Data unification is an overwhelming endeavor, to say the least, so consolidate your data based on a use case–driven approach, then establish your customer data platform (CDP). Your goal is to build a golden record — a single source of truth for all your customer data — which you can achieve with the help of tools such as Salesforce Customer 360 Data Manager.

As you go, audit each data source to identify potential gaps that may cause mistrust among teams. For example, you might find that a team is keeping valuable information because it wants to get ahead of other teams. Or perhaps the tool they use to collect data is cut off from the rest of your system. Whatever the reason, isolated data can mean missed opportunities to track customer journeys.

Resolve and optimize data collection to ensure it meets the unified measurement model’s requirements and provides all the necessary information you need to prioritize use cases.

Change management is often the last thing business leaders consider, but it’s the most critical to a successful digital transformation. Plan for time to train teams on your vision for the ideal customer experience. Demonstrate how they are instrumental in providing that ideal experience by clearly laying out your newly developed roadmaps.

Once you align teams, set up an intake process for ongoing feedback about improving the experience. Take feedback seriously and hold your business accountable so you don’t revert to a disconnected customer experience.