Customer data platform: A win-win for the entire C-suite
Adding a data-driven customer experience strategy can help organizations remain competitive and engage customers in more meaningful ways. Interestingly, this is no longer a marketing-only function and requires a shared effort across the business in order to be successful. Chief marketing officers can’t rely solely on traditional methods and channels to connect with audiences anymore. They need the ability to collect, analyze, and interpret vast amounts of customer data at scale in order to deliver personal and intuitive customer experiences that hinge on the cooperation of both the chief marketing officer and chief information officer.
Both roles have grown in recent years as organizations respond to the changing customer landscape where the chief information officer has become the new experience maker and the chief marketing officer has become the new data steward. With customer experience hinging on the infrastructure and analytics to successfully manage and interpret customer data, it’s essential to remove barriers between IT and marketing to allow for greater cooperation and effectiveness. By working together in support of a more customer-centric vision, the two business leaders can establish more comprehensive data compliance and security protocols while driving cross-department ROI on technology investments and efforts behind the customer experience strategy.
Bridging the gap
A customer data platform (CDP) like Dynamics 365 Customer Insights provides a win-win for IT and line of businesses across the organization such as sales, services, or marketing. Intended as a line of business-managed system, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps dramatically reduce the burden on IT, simplifying data unification and systems integration along with built-in compliance and security protocols that safeguard all customer data in a hands-off fashion. This not only helps organizations realize faster time to value, but gives line of businesses more control over data-driven initiatives with only the occasional heavy lifting needed from IT. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights unifies all sources of customer data including structured, unstructured, and third-party, from across the organization along with the capability to both interpret and act on that data at scale – all without the need for complex, redundant, and time-consuming configurations.
Key benefits of Dynamics 365 Customer Insights
- Unification of data: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights takes the legwork, complexity, and cost of unifying data from across the organization in a central location, with the ability to automatically discover, ingest, and store all of the data generated from all sources and channels.
- Self-service: Dynamics 365 Customer Insights’ self-service configuration enables business users to get up and running quickly with very little lifting from IT, but also allows line of businesses to have more control over initiatives without waiting on technical assistance for every change such as integrating new data sources, adding segments, or creating reports.
- Data-driven decisions: With built-in analytics capabilities, AI, and machine learning, business users can quickly gather actionable insights, then leverage pre-built connectors to take immediate action through the external tools and platforms like email campaigns, point of sale, and social media that are used to engage customers.
- Data ownership: Without a customer data platform, organizations have to rely on third-party providers to handle their first-party customer information, which leaves data open to security vulnerabilities that are out of the organization’s hands. With Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, organizations have complete control over their data as it resides in their own tenant.
- Data protection and compliance: In the wake of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), it’s all about knowing where your customer data comes from, where it resides, and how to remove customer data if requested. Dynamics 365 Customer Insights makes identity resolution safe and error-free, creating a single, unified image of each customer that makes it simpler to maintain compliance and reduce the amount of hands-on work required by IT. Once a customer opts-out of engagement, the system automatically removes them from receiving any future contact, keeping the organization compliant with GDPR regulations.
Learn more
- Watch our webinar— Personalized Experiences with a 360-Degree View of Your Customers—for a closer look at how Dynamics 365 Customer Insights helps your marketing, sales, and service professionals tailor digital and one-to-one customer interactions at scale.
- Download this eBook, Digitally Transforming Customer Experiences or visit the website below to get started with Dynamics 365 Customer Insights.
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