How to Build a Winning Data Strategy to Transform Customer Experience

The digital world has seen massive innovation. At the heart of this innovation lies the power of harnessing data, which is the key to informed decision-making and fueling progress. From the products we buy to the content we consume online, data is used to personalize our experiences, which also drives business success. In the public sector, data plays an equally critical role — it helps guide policymakers to make informed decisions about delivering citizen services and enables more impactful governance. However, building a winning data strategy hinges on data management and governance.

So what’s holding organizations back from building a winning data strategy today? In a McKinsey survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents stated their organization lacked a well-defined process to integrate new and existing data sources. According to a Gartner report, 44% of leaders cited understanding third-party compliance as one of the key challenges in establishing a sound data governance strategy.

Without a sustainable data management and governance environment, companies can easily get bogged down with managing data instead of using it to innovate, impeding business-critical initiatives and leading to data debt.

Understanding the Data Explosion

Data has become the lifeline of our increasingly interconnected world and a crucial lever for driving customer experience. As data volume increases, business stakeholders and decision makers contend with growing risk and complexity to classify, manage and identify what is most important. The key to navigating this complex landscape lies in creating a unified, single environment that can seamlessly integrate, process and manage data across multiple systems, helping users manage data lineage effectively.

Real-World Success Stories: Turning Data into Value

To understand the critical role of data management, let's examine it through the lens of two real-world applications:

1. Insurance Provider Accelerates Customer Experience

One of our clients, a leading insurance provider, faced the critical challenge of transforming its underwriting platform to deliver online quotes quickly while maintaining risk assessment standards. In order to remain competitive, the insurer had to respond to quote requests within milliseconds while accurately evaluating driver profiles and delivering competitive rates to candidates. By implementing a data management platform, the company was able to integrate multiple data validation services and third-party sources, thus delivering personalized insurance pricing within 400 milliseconds. It also scaled its data team threefold without any performance degradation while implementing real-time analytics dashboards for business intelligence.

2. Software Company Achieves a 360° Customer View

In another scenario, a mid-sized software client competing against giants like Amazon transformed its customer engagement strategy by solving a critical data integration challenge. While the company had invested in CRM and integrated marketing apps, it struggled to achieve a real-time, 360-degree view of its customers. Through a more cohesive data management platform, the company transformed its customer data strategy, achieving flexible deployments across multiple cloud platforms. Additionally, they unified customer data from multiple sources, enabling sales and marketing teams to access customer insights and deliver personalized experiences from day one.

When evaluating data management tools, businesses should focus on some key factors. The complexity and distributed nature of data needed for real-time decision-making mean it is important to break down data silos and shift toward a unified data management approach. Thus, the solution should be flexible enough to integrate data from multiple disparate sources in near real time. Another key factor is support for regulations according to global laws to ensure data sovereignty within geographical boundaries. Metadata creation is equally important as it helps users identify and understand data easily. Real-time analytics can help to take timely actions and dramatically scale business success.

Turning Data into a Strategic Advantage

Successful data management and governance isn't about isolated initiatives; it's about organization-wide transformation. To make data management and governance more pervasive, IT leaders will have to apply best practices more broadly across the business. By investing in it as a strategic priority aligned to line-of-business objectives, organizations can deliver on business goals and meet growing customer expectations.

Here are three essential steps to build a strong business case for a robust data strategy:

• Begin with an internal audit that outlines the foundation for success. It is important to get an up-to-date understanding of aspects such as the distribution of data across multiple environments and the compliant use of data. This visibility also provides insights into cost models and can help pinpoint inefficiencies. For instance, there might be cases of data duplication that could lead to wasted efforts, which impacts IT spending. By collaborating with a data management partner, one can understand the overall health of one’s governed data estate, address data fragmentation and get a unified experience to meet business objectives.
• Map business value with key stakeholders to connect data to business outcomes. Engage with cross-functional leaders to align the data strategy with business goals. Define clear outcomes, such as improved customer insights or accelerated innovation, and link these to better data-driven decisions.
• Get a clear picture of the total cost of ownership and the investments required. Beyond upfront technology costs, consider ongoing expenses like process redesign, governance tools and additional cloud infrastructure. Understanding these costs can prevent surprises and build a compelling case for long-term ROI.

A New Approach to Taming Data Chaos

Most organizations have different standards around data access, quality, security and observability. A popular concept taking hold in enterprises is metadata management, which allows automating data management. Metadata management has emerged as a viable approach for making data more accessible and accelerating time-to-value for businesses by providing unified data intelligence and governance.

Thus, in closing, as we embrace data-driven strategies, data management and governance will be instrumental in driving innovation.