Data Silos Kill Customer Experience

In the following article we consider and discuss the following paradox that on the one hand the implementation of a successful Customer Experience (CX) / Lead-to-Cash process is very dependent on data generated from activities in CX instances such as marketing, e-commerce, sales, logistics to service & support. But on the other hand, if these collected data remain in their data silos without any or inadequate integration, any attempt to implement a successful CX can make them fail, or not achieve the experience that would make customers loyal and stay satisfied.

Here we first look at the case of a rather typical standard customer journey for companies in the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) environment who are tackling the digital transformation of their CX process.

The linkage of digital marketing activities in which leads are generated with digital campaigns that lead to e-commerce sales, with possible customer support points of contact and subsequent additional cross & upsell via e-commerce online store. And of course, new sales cycles can be started with the existing customers or contacts (and not yet customers) in order to achieve more sales.

But the described case will unfortunately not run smoothly in reality so often, if the generated data from the respective CX process instances is a mixture of offline and diverse online data and the online data of the instances remain in their data silos and are not integrated with each other.

How the data silos described above do not kill the CX but bring them to success can be shown with a best practice. Every optimal customer journey needs a good understanding of typical customer personas (1). The attributes of the personas can be wonderfully collected and processed as data in the context of consensual-supported marketing activities. For this customer data treasure to be properly utilized, it must continue to be constantly enriched with data along the identified customer journey from e-commerce, sales, post-sales and service & support activities. Because with the help of this silo-independent data treasure, a modern data management and analytics system, as well as software automated process flows between the CX instances, one would be in a better position to react much faster to customer needs or to deliver even better added value to the customer through additional products and services. This, in turn, could lead to the customer being even closer to the company and products to bind and best forever.

In order to achieve optimization from above, the following proposed steps would be necessary.

1. Integration of all instances of the CX in order to keep the lead-to-cash process within the customer journey smooth.
2. A data silo that has all data in common - about the customers and their customer journeys, or if several data silos, but then all integrated with each other.
3. Integration can only work optimally if change management includes all relevant roles in the company that are responsible for CX from the outset. That means management, marketing, sales, e-commerce, service & support and IT.
4. And finally, the optimization of CX is not a one-time project, but a digital transformation journey and therefore it should be constantly readjusted to respond to changing customer needs and market conditions optimally. This requires an orchestration of a set Customer Experience Office as a recommendation.

Authors: Alexander Netzel (SAP SE), Fabian Simoneit (SAP SE)

1) More about the topic was published in the following article: Digital Transformation Journey for Midsize Businesses, Link