A business thrives on understanding and catering to its customers’ expectations, and data is an essential tool for this purpose. However, as data channels grow, you need a mechanism to optimize them to deliver better value from the information you gain from them.

Data centralization is key to exploiting the maximum use of the data available for your organization. In fact, the latest CX trends show that data centralization will soon be a priority among brands that want high-quality data to deliver an exceptional customer experience. 

Here’s what it does! 

1. Elimination of Siloed Data 

The primary benefit of centralizing data is that it improves cross-team collaboration and fosters efficiency. Siloed data is not much use, especially when you want to analyze different data sets together and determine correlations between variables. For example, centralization will allow your CX team to identify how different emotions affect sales by comparing EVI® and sales data.

Consolidating all the data in one place ensures all the teams have access to the latest and complete data of other teams if and when they need it. It also helps employees understand the impact of their performance on other teams and the buying journey.

2. Easy Accessibility and Faster Decision-Making

Centralization of data also helps companies and CX teams make better decisions faster. The time spent from accessing data to reaching conclusions is significantly reduced because everything is streamlined. The data analytics process is expedited, and you can gain a well-rounded picture of your customer with less effort. 

With an enterprise data model, you have data from different sources and systems all in one place. All data sets also tend to be consistent in format, making it easier for everyone to utilize them. Moreover, everyone will be familiar with the unified database system, and this will further reduce the time spent on structuring and restructuring data sets. 

3. Improvement in Quality of Customer Data

Centralization also makes the management of data more convenient. There won’t be a duplication of resources, and everything is organized under one platform. Therefore, data can easily be validated, updated, and enriched easily (e.g. customer profiles). Overall, it becomes easier to clean and improve your data with time. 

Enrichment, in particular, will provide context to your data, and it’s useful in identifying the factors affecting customer behavior and purchase decisions. You will be able to spot trends or patterns that won’t be possible if you rely solely on CX data for analysis. The result is that your data analysis will be high-quality, more relevant to the time, and rich in detail. Forecasting and planning are easier as well as you can create better personalized automated communication. 

4. Helps You Gain a Competitive Advantage

In this dynamic and competitive business environment, brands need to look for ways to stay ahead of their rivals through innovation and better customer experience. Data centralization can help you with both. For one, you will have access to real-time and accurate data on your customers as well as the market dynamics. It will help you identify new opportunities and capitalize on them sooner (or even instantly). 

Secondly, all the teams in the organization have access to this data to improve their performance, and eventually, customers will benefit from a high-quality personalized experience throughout the buying journey. Overall, data-driven businesses experience sustainable and steady growth and can maneuver unfavorable economic conditions with better preparedness. 

Takeaway

The benefits of consolidating your data sets don’t end here, and we are sure you know it too. But, the process of consolidation is no easy feat either. Data comes in many forms and varies in complexity, and it’s no less than a challenge for brands to combine them in a streamlined manner. Therefore, you must invest in a user-friendly and efficient data consolidation platform with capabilities to support, protect, and process your data.

Where to start from?

Evaluate your business goals and map what data your business needs to reach your goals. It is not only about tracking your revenue growth; it is also important to map your customer journey and think about what type of data gives you insight into how you are moving toward your goals (pre-purchase customer experience, pre-purchase web store conversions, post-purchase customer experience, post-purchase customer retention, etc.).

If you don’t have a proper customer journey mapping template yet, then here is the journey mapping template that is used by thousands of businesses around the globe (and we are also using it with our customers). It’s a simple Excel file, so super easy to use and manage. We’ve also added comprehensive instructions there. Hope you’ll like it!