Making customers feel seen and heard at every stage of their journey can reap huge rewards for businesses, so engaging customers with relevant communications in real-time is a commercial priority. However, delivering timely and truly meaningful interactions relies on rich data – and knowing how to use it.

Enriching your customer experiences through quality data

With access to high-quality data, organizations can develop a deeper understanding of their audiences, create a consistently meaningful experience for their customers, and build mutually beneficial relationships that last over time. 

Yet, what’s missing amongst many organizations is an in-depth understanding of how to achieve these results by processing, analyzing, and utilizing customer data to its full potential. It’s not just the type or volume of data you collect that counts, but how you decide to use it. 

Ultimately, for businesses to become truly customer-centric, they must develop a data maturity roadmap that allows them to leverage what they know about their customers to deliver consistently optimized experiences.

It’s how businesses use their customer data that counts

Personalized customer interactions are no longer new or impressive. They’re expected. However, many organizations aren’t doing enough to engage their audiences with the right content, at the right time, and in the right place. 

Frustratingly, many businesses already have all the data they need at their fingertips to achieve this. From audience demographics to buying behaviors and channel preferences, businesses are exposed to a wealth of valuable data every day.  

However, collecting this data should be only the first stage in an organization’s journey towards developing relevant customer experiences. To really take advantage of the information accessible to them, businesses need to aggregate their customer data from across multiple platforms as it evolves in real-time, ultimately developing a Single Customer View (SCV).  

By developing a SCV, organizations put the power of intelligent decision-making into the hands of their marketers, empowering them to orchestrate personalized omnichannel experiences when they’re likely to make the most impact.  

But, how can businesses tap into this level of intelligence? 

To transform their data into insights, organizations should look to enhance their current data ecosystem with an advanced customer data platform (CDP), such as NGDATA’s Intelligent Engagement Platform. With an advanced CDP, businesses can combine their historical and real-time data stores with intelligent analytics to not only understand their customers, but know exactly how to target them now and in the future. 

By investing in a more sophisticated data ecosystem with a CDP, organizations can determine the next best experience for their customers, identify cross- and upselling opportunities to increase customer lifetime value (CTLV), and target new audiences based on their current high-value customers.

Driving real customer value through a mature data strategy

Only when an organization is harnessing aggregated, cross-channel data to target customers with personalized interactions can it be considered data mature — and there are clear commercial benefits to making data maturity a priority.  

For instance, Forbes found that 62% of businesses attribute faster decision-making to data analytics, 51% believe that data analytics allow better insight into their customers, and 49% said that access to this intelligence enabled them to engage their customers more successfully.  

What’s more, according to a survey by McKinsey, data-driven businesses are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers successfully, and nine times more likely to outperform their non-data-led competitors when it comes to customer retention.  

While the advantages of unlocking data potential are clear from a commercial perspective, the challenge for many organizations is knowing where to begin. After all, understanding how to leverage insights for better customer experiences relies on first assessing the maturity of your current data strategy.

Assess your customer data maturity

To support organizations at this stage of their customer experience roadmap, we’ve designed the Customer Data Maturity Assessment (CDMA) tool, built to provide a clear overview of how successfully businesses are utilizing quality data to engage their customers with contextually relevant experiences. 

By analyzing key data maturity milestones, from implementing an intelligent data stack to developing a single customer view, the CDMA tool will assess your data approach and offer expert feedback on how to continue optimizing your strategy with a CDP. 

Take our five-step assessment, or watch the NGDATA Intelligent Engagement Platform product video to learn how its data-led functionalities could help you drive real value for your customers.  

If you’d like to discuss how integrating the Intelligent Engagement Platform could advance your company’s data strategy in more detail, get in touch or book a demo today.