Redesigning data strategy for better customer experience

This is the era of consumerism. It influences our choices and ultimately decisions. Over the last few years, consumers have evolved drastically, be it in retail, healthcare, or any sector. Today, the consumer is more informed – they take charge, make the decisions, and control their entire decision-making journey.

However, along their journey, they leave precious data breadcrumbs, the information vital to facilitating a better consumer experience. Organizations must identify the value of leveraging this consumer data in order to unlock the success formula.

When served with relevant data at the right time and speed and crucially to the right people, organizations can derive actionable insights – thereby making fast, effective decisions and enabling optimal performance. This ability of an organization to digest data and glean actionable insights is called data metabolism.

A study conducted by DXC Research revealed that most organizations are suffering a crisis, being overwhelmed by a tsunami of data. Poor data metabolism prevents organizations from evaluating and acting on risk-reward criteria of decisions or, in some cases, making any decision at all – hence organizations are unable to deliver a superior customer experience exacerbated by an inability to metabolize data. These organizations with impaired data metabolism and overly democratized data, analytics and other information assets are encouraging the people invested in protracting or preventing decision making.

For boosting data metabolism and improving decision making, organizations can adapt the 3D’s taxonomy and framework that focuses on three states of decision making: Discover, Develop and Defend. This is a comprehensive data strategy that describes the primary states and outcomes of business activity. By focusing on the 3Ds, organizations can cut through silos, boost data metabolism, and reach a new level of data-driven decision-making.

Data metabolism can be improved through cautious mediations that balance both decision-making and data engineering, as encapsulated in figure below:

This optimal metabolism aligns data focus and activities with business strategy in the following ways:

• Increases Strategic Decision-Making:The insights allow you to assess your consumers, uncover critical pain points and discover new opportunities to delight leads
• Enhances Customer Mapping:This map various touchpoints of a customer journey using the data to pinpoint strengths to capitalize on and weaknesses to work over.  
• Improves Customer Service:The data can be fed to machine learning algorithms and chatbots that can evolve their responses to fit your customers’ needs. 
• Predicts Trends:Predictive data analytics gives you a glimpse of future trends in the consumer journey.

When data is used or metabolized effectively, it generates actionable insights for superior customer experience and the means to identify, articulate and balance opportunity and risk accurately. After all, balancing risk and reward and acting informedly in a way that best serves your business goals is the core competency of a successful organization. This is a valuable leadership skill, as negotiating the risk-reward gap inevitably leads to adjusting for a certain level of conflict when deciding where a company must play.

The author is Sreenath AV, Global Leader of Applications and Analytics, GBS, DXC Technology - India