Connecting The Dots, Connecting The Data

It takes months to find a customer and only seconds to lose one, or so the saying goes. These days, however, it might be more like milliseconds. Thanks to on-demand information and services available anytime, anywhere, customers are more empowered than ever before and have sky-high expectations. If your customer is bored or impatient, confused or frustrated, for even just a second, there are a myriad other choices they can turn to.

- Kenneth Lei

Gartner predicts by 2020, poor customer experiences will destroy nearly a third of digital business projects, and PwC reports that 73 per cent of customers now point to experience as an important factor in their purchasing decision.

In this context, providing a personalised, seamless, predictive customer experience is a core pillar of business success — and the only way to achieve that is by connecting every part of the enterprise and making sure customers are at the centre of all decision-making.

Connection and integration help businesses answer that all-important question — how do I maintain a single view of my customer? The average consumer generates a huge amount of data every day, across a vast range of channels; and, in fact, an estimated 90 per cent of the data that now exists was created in the past two years. On social, mobile, desktop and connected TV, consumers are creating masses of data based on their interests, purchases, location and brand sentiment. But when all that data remains isolated in business silos, the view of the customer becomes fragmented.