by Barton Goldenberg
In our experience, companies that have been successful in their digital transformation efforts employ an integrated framework, where data produced and used in various customer-facing projects is integrated and shared seamlessly between activities. Companies that have struggled to tackle digital transformation typically fall short with respect to one or more of five key building blocks.
CRM
Data & Analytics
Social Media Communities
Customer Engagement
Emerging Technologies
Often, they lack a roadmap that incorporates and integrates each of these elements to guide their digital transformation initiatives. In our next few emails, we’ll take a closer look at each of these components, beginning with the closely-related topics of CRM and data analytics.
CRM
From its inception in the mid-1980s, CRM has grown into a mature and rapidly evolving, $40 billion industry, impacting sales, marketing and customer service/call center enablement across hundreds of thousands of organizations. The successes have been real, and the results have been significant. At the same time, many organizations have struggled to build successful CRM programs and realize acceptable returns on investment. The current CRM failure rate is still greater than 50%, and that does not include organizations that have achieved only marginal returns or have never been able to fully implement their CRM programs.
At the core of successful digital transformation efforts are holistic customer profiles that get leveraged across all of the organization’s customer-facing activities. Even today, companies need to spend more time, money, and effort to create comprehensive profiles that integrate transactional, CRM, and third-party data with both offline and online customer information. When they fall short, it typically is not due to technology. Most CRM applications have the capabilities, including AI and process automation tools, to create these profiles. More often, the shortfall is a lack of structured business processes to gather the necessary information—and to keep the profiles clean and useful over time.
Data & Analytics
Data-driven decision making is a requirement for effective digital transformation. Data analytics leverages information from traditional media as well as new and emerging digital sources to help companies better understand their customers while profitably and proactively managing the customer lifecycle. Successful companies continually mine their holistic customer profiles with data & analytics processes and tools that help them derive insights into customer preferences, enhance segmentation, improve journey maps, sharpen lead scoring and routing, achieve better forecasting and cross-selling, and more.
The abundance of customer information available in the digital realm enables us to know more than ever before about what customers are buying, what they like, and what’s important to them. This enables us to better model customer behaviors and create more effective marketing campaigns, more focused sales activities, and improved customer service and support experiences.
ISM understands that having a sturdy data foundation today is critical to successful customer engagement in the future. We work with our clients to identify and acquire the right data sets. From there, we determine the right analytic approach to help them develop new ways to explore and exchange data, collaborate and innovate, derive better insights, increase business revenue, and create happier, more loyal customers.
Please download Data and Analytics Maturity: The Foundation for Getting Digital Transformation Right!‘ Thought Leadership Paper. Discover what the most successful companies are implementing to transform and lead their industry.
We would enjoy the opportunity to help you create or improve your digital transformation strategy and its implementation. To schedule a session with us and discover how we can help your organization become a digital disruptor in your industry, click here.
Comments are closed.