By Boomi
Customer data is a vital component of nearly every business process. From sales and marketing to product development and customer success, these insights are crucial to allocating the company’s time and resources. But when customer data is siloed across departments and even between different applications within the same department, you miss out on valuable opportunities to better understand your customers.
It’s possible to unlock these actionable insights through customer data integration. Read on to learn more about what customer data integration is, how it can improve various aspects of your company’s operation, and how Boomi can facilitate smooth and long-lasting customer data connectivity.
What Is Customer Data Integration?
Customer data integration (CDI) is collecting, organizing, and managing customer data from multiple sources in a single location. This is achieved by connecting any application that collects information about a customer and a centralized platform, usually a CRM. These connections can be made manually by creating custom code, sourcing individual pre-made connectors for each application, or implementing an iPaaS solution like the Boomi platform.
Benefits of Integrated Customer Data
Rather than siloing customer data and other records within multiple business applications and platforms, customer data integration creates a single source of truth across the organization for each customer. The benefits of this “golden record” are traditionally associated with improving how sales and marketing teams can interact with customers. However, the benefits of a 360-degree view of each customer reach far beyond those functions, providing valuable insights for every step of the product lifecycle and customer journey.
1. Better customer insights
When all customer data is integrated into a single system, customer records are updated instantly and automatically whenever there’s a change in any connected application. This gives every department access to any relevant customer data that would otherwise be unavailable without relying on other departments to share it or manually update it. With this depth and breadth of data access, everyone in the organization can better understand their customers’ needs and expectations.
2. More personalized customer experience
Centralized and automated customer data integration provides a high-resolution profile for each customer. These details allow marketing to fine-tune automated emails and other content with details obtained from that specific customer’s previous interactions with the ecommerce system, social media channels, and prior emails. Sales can use this information to know when and how best to contact a lead and what that prospect wants to get from that conversation. When these customer-facing interactions can include a complete picture of the individual customer’s preferences and history with the company, they’re more likely to advance in the funnel, make a purchase, and remain loyal to the brand.
3. Inform data-driven business decisions
Integrated customer data can inform decisions for more than the sales and marketing teams. When data is accessible and reliable across the company, it can drive other key business decisions. Product development can use it to help guide new features without needing to request information from the marketing or customer success departments. The IT department can use trends in support ticket data to identify weak spots more quickly. Removing data from silos and integrating it into a central system expedites and improves decision-making across every department.
Customer Data Integration Challenges
1. Inconsistent Data
Because so much of the data used in transactions is provided by customers, there is a much higher probability that data input contains errors like improper formatting, or data being put in the wrong field in error. The ability to validate this data at the point of collection and standardize the formatting before it enters your systems can help every transaction proceed smoothly.
2. Multiple Data Sources
Marketing, content management, storefront, analytics, and ERP tools will all generate data which needs to be integrated to provide more relevant buying experiences to customers. Data architecture and integration patterns must be carefully planned to ensure that each platform is being updated without inappropriate data overwrites or duplication.
3. Exchanging Data at Scale
Moving data between sources at scale in a way that is compliant, efficient, and accurate is a significant challenge. Exchanging data in the right order, and only moving the data that is needed, is an important part of minimizing cloud computing and processing costs.
Best Practices for Customer Data Integration
Customer data integration can fundamentally shift the efficiency and effectiveness of each department in your company. These best practices can help:
1. Integrate all sources of data
For customer data to be truly integrated, break down all silos. That means tracking down and connecting every customer touchpoint, every internal record, and any other source of data associated with your customers into a central system. If any application is left out of the integration process, customer records will be incomplete. Customer data will be bifurcated and create a risk of inconsistent and unsatisfactory customer interactions.
In addition to identifying all customer data sources, you should ensure that the data is collected in a single location. Many large companies will have multiple CRMs storing customer data within different departments. These records must be consolidated and merged into one central system to ensure clean, accurate data.
2. Define unique data markers
In the data consolidation process, it’s important that records are merged accurately. Otherwise, duplicate records may be created or mismatched records may be combined, undermining the goal of the customer data integration initiative.
Define the unique data markers used to identify individual records, such as email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, customer ID numbers, or other pieces of data likely to be associated with customer records and are unlikely to be duplicated across records. This will speed up the process of record consolidation and provide a greater certainty that records are properly merged.
3. Designate data stewards
No matter how thorough and meticulous your data migration process is, there are bound to be errors. These errors are only a problem if they go unchecked. To make sure the data is as clean as possible, designate data stewards to verify record accuracy. Data verification should not be limited to a one-time sweep of records after the initial data migration process. Data stewards should examine records on an ongoing basis to ensure that mistakes promptly are caught to avoid poor customer experiences due to inaccurate data.
4. Customize your dashboard
The promise of vast amounts of data can be alluring. However, that data is only useful if it is actionable. You must determine what data is relevant to get actionable customer insights. Once you have decided which numbers will drive your business decisions, customize a dashboard to display that information. The dashboard for someone on the marketing team will look very different from the dashboard for someone on the business intelligence team or the product development team. Custom dashboards allow every bit of data to be collected and stored while at the same time preventing information overload.
5. Plan for future integration needs
The customer data integration process is often a significant undertaking, and when done properly can provide immense value to the company. However, the initial integration process is, by definition, a one-time project, which means that it only accounts for the software and other business systems used when the original integration happens. When new applications are developed, they must be integrated into the central data system. The easiest way to accommodate future integrations is to build your initial integration with an iPaaS, like the Boomi platform. Internal and third-party applications, new and old, are much easier to connect with your existing systems when the customer data integration process is implemented on a purpose-built platform with dedicated support and development.
Customer Data Integration With Boomi
When customer data generated by your entire ecosystem of business systems and applications is integrated and stored in a central location, the customer experience is enhanced, and smarter business decisions are made. The Boomi platform enables a fast turnaround in integrating customer data from disparate systems. We are constantly developing new connectors, so you can be sure to integrate the next big application in your ecosystem without a blip.
Explore the business insights your customer data can provide with our eBook, “Modern ERPs Allow Organizations to Integrate and Accelerate.”