Highly Competitive - software industry insights

Business Transformation Demands Modern Data Integration

   

Part 1 of a multi-part series on the essential interwoven nature of Business and Modern Data Integration

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Business and Data Transformations

Forward-moving businesses and their data needs comprise a whole new world that is constantly changing. This new data-smart world is built on expanded approaches to data integration that have become known collectively as Modern Data Integration. If businesses want the right kind of data to underpin advanced analytics processes or to create multi-dimensional views of customers, data integration must be pursued as a strategic function that aligns with business objectives.

Most organizations have entered the digital realm, where various aspects of business increasingly incorporate cloud, social and mobile as important platforms. As the usage of these platforms grows, we see more changes in both business and customer behavior. To perform well in the digital realm requires an elastic organization.

Elasticity, both as business and technology infrastructure paradigms, enables organizations to tap into dynamic business models, decision-making processes, and technology mechanisms to strengthen responsiveness to any situation. To empower enterprise elasticity, organizations have to commit to continually improving data gathering methods, analytics approaches, business processes, and bi-directional connections between the people of the organization.

 

Modern Business Means Modern Data Integration

Vital data needed by organizations frequently is found not only outside the enterprise data warehouse, but outside the enterprise. Businesses are pressed to recognize the value that can come from integrating data from a variety of sources. Data management and data integration solutions have been strongly challenged to handle continuous changes in data and how it's used, increasingly in real-time.

Modern data integration builds on technologies and processes that long have been part of the bigger world of data integration, beyond basic ETL functions. Practices like data quality, data profiling and data governance (also highly relevant to business users) comprise important capabilities that are central to reliable up-to-date data, no matter the source or structure.

Modern data integration offerings encompass interoperating multi-platform solutions (iPaaS and on-premises), as well as pure-play cloud and SaaS solutions, where the lines continue to blur between application and data integration. Today modern data integration stands as a critical endeavor that must be agile and business-responsive, directly underlying many initiatives that can make or break organizational success: analytics and decision-making; real-time processes to engender improved customer experiences; omnichannel and digital marketing; intelligent business automation; alignment with digital transformation -- and so on.

Newer technologies like graph databases and data virtualization have contributed to the metamorphosis of traditional data integration into modern data integration, as have concepts like 'good-enough' data quality and data mash-ups. Part of the metamorphosis is to provide access to business users, to give them more hands-on power for data usage and analytics. The metamorphosis also reflects needs such as real-time situational awareness analytics, frequently run as continuous processes. With these changes, modern data integration also takes on the burden of ensuring that business users are protected from the inherent pitfalls of concepts like 'good enough' data quality and data mash-ups.

 

The Seeds of Modern Data Integration

For data integration solutions, the reality of modern data integration has been a work-in-progress for several years. Some solutions began with integrations designed specifically for cloud to cloud data flows, and then expanded to include cloud to on-premises. Then there's the Salesforce ecosystem of third-party vendors that has been a strong driver for developing cloud to on-premises (and back) integration flows, and a distinct incubator of Data Integration as a Service.

As cloud services proliferated, established integration solutions were augmented to work with cloud data flows, and thereby expanding their data integration capabilities into "new" territory. Traditional data integration vendors are adding cloud-based solutions. Some solutions have come into the modern data integration arena from the world of ETL and EDW; some from the application integration spaces of ESB / SOA / EAI. Modern data integration also has origins in the multi-structured worlds of B2B data exchanges and business messaging systems.

Master data management has a part in the evolution of modern data integration. MDM has a growing role in many areas that matter to organizations: strong brand presence, multichannel customer interactions, right-fit content and information, and highly variable buying journeys. Master data is critical to providing context to big data sources, to connect big data fragments to customers and transactions. A quick survey of new entrants for MDM solutions shows a conscious recognition that data management has to parallel how the business works and recognize highly variable data sources that are needed for full-bodied master data.

 

What Matters Most: The Buyer Perspective

Modern data integration is a whole new world, in a clean slate sort of way, because it must serve a business world that is constantly changing. This is what should matter to the buyers of data integration solutions. Modern data integration solutions are meant to handle numerous business use cases with ease, while providing value to IT and business roles.

In the past, vendors of data integration solutions solely targeted IT as their buyers, principally because many data integration solutions were very "hands on", more like developer tools. Modern data integration includes a significant change: more opportunities for business users of various levels of technical proficiency to directly use - and even create - data integration processes. For IT roles, modern data integration offers more streamlined, pre-built and reusable components, to speed up the creation of more complex integrations.

For modern data integration solutions, all buyer perspectives matter, whether related to business or technical roles. In reality, for most technology purchases (especially in larger organizations), there is often a "composite" buyer made up of IT and business roles. A tech-savvy buyer will already know the history of data integration and a lot about the "new world" of modern data integration. A more business-oriented buyer doesn't care where modern data integration came from, but needs to know that the solution will support business initiatives that map to desired business outcomes.

The essential perspective is that both buyers simply want to know if the modern data integration solution is going to take care of what they need to do now, often in terms of business-related projects and objectives.

 

Image Source: planview.com

 

About the author: Julie is an independent consultant and industry analyst for B2B software solutions, providing services to vendors to improve strategies for customers and target markets, products and solutions, and future direction. Julie has expertise in several solution spaces including: data integration and data quality; analytics and BI; business process, workflow and collaboration; digital marketing, WCM and social media; and the pivotal importance of user and customer experiences. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitive and on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Managed Services -- Building Real Customer Experiences and Relationships

 

Just like any other business, Managed Services Providers have an important path to follow, to distinctly set their services apart from other MSPs. This path pivots on the commitment to ensuring continuously improved customer and user experiences. High quality experiences for clients comprise a great differentiator in the ever-growing world of new managed services firms and cloud solution vendors. Many services can quickly become commoditized, and too often MSPs resort to "differentiating" on price, a dangerous path that can lead to failure.

As customer and user expectations rise, putting strong focus on their experiences with the MSP organization and its services is a must-have. Customer and user experiences are made up of all interactions across all channels during the entire lifecycle of the client company as an MSP customer, which introduces numerous opportunities to better engage and serve clients.

 

Experiences across the Customer Organization

There are often multiple roles in a single organization that make up the 'customers' and 'users' for technology services. This means very different experiences take place from role to role.

The customer experience frequently aligns with the buyer journey, and post-sale account management for a particular client company. The customer-as-buyer often is a composite of roles: mid-level managers who choose services and technology, VPs who approve purchases, CEOs and CFOs who influence or dictate purchase decisions, and even accounting staff who enact purchase transactions. Defining and engendering excellent experiences for a customer or buyer journey comprised of all of these roles usually requires a lot of work. But this is work that should be done for MSPs to better understand their "customers".

The user experience is much more than utilizing technology services – it's all the interactions that occur during the life cycle of services for a particular set of end users and customers. The term user journey may be the best for describing the ongoing relationship between users and MSPs and the services they provide, including customer support.

Within client organizations, communication disconnects often occur between the customer-as-buyer and end users that can jeopardize the customer relationships that MSPs need to build.

 

Customer Relationships Suffer when Communication Breaks Down

Customer Centricity has taken a look at the communication gaps that can adversely affect customer experiences. The quadrant diagram below spans both the client and MSP organizations to depict how collaboration and communication can fall apart due to disconnects between MSP roles and client roles. Enhanced awareness of these roles should help MSPs consciously improve communications and processes between their organizational roles and client roles, ultimately to ensure positive long-term relationships.

 

            Customer Centricity - Communication Disconnects

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Image & explanation: Customer Centricity

 

Quadrant 1: The (customer) business manager doesn't truly understand the value that is being delivered by the MSP. They only hear reference to the MSP when there is a service problem. When it comes time to reduce expenses, they are hard pressed to justify the line item representing the cost of the MSP.

Quadrant 2: The (MSP) Sales Representative has little to no insight into how the (client) company is "truly" leveraging the product, the benefits that are being realized, the issues being experienced by those using the product and the value being delivered by the "service organization."

Quadrant 3: The customer's end-users and technical contacts play a key role in the effective use and performance of the MSP's service. They are also key in shaping the business manager's perception of the MSP. However, the only time that they discuss the MSP is when there is a problem. They don't discuss all the great things that the MSP has done on a day-in / day-out basis.

Quadrant 4: (MSP) Customer Service / Technical Support typically observe that "all things are well with the customer." This impression, which can often be false, is created because the customer's end-users maintain a courteous working relationship with the MSP's service personnel, to make sure that they can continue to "get things done" when they really need to.

Problems Impact All Quadrants: When a significant business disrupting problem occurs (which it WILL), the customer's end-user remains calm, cool and collected when speaking with the MSP's service team. The service team doesn't find it necessary to escalate awareness of the "incident" to the MSP's Sales Representative or Senior Management because they don't understand the level of impact

 

Building Real Customer Relationships

Many of the "business-as-usual" activities for MSPs are rich opportunities to enhance customer experiences and build long-term relationships. Important areas that make a difference are already in play: basics like consistently meeting or exceeding SLAs, delivering on all promises, usability and ease-of-use, high performance, and so on. This is how trust is built for real relationships.

MSPs can make sure that new client relationships are built on great customer experiences by starting with onboarding processes and/or service activation. MSPs should allocate strong resources that will make these introductory functions engaging, effective and worthwhile. Obviously when done well, a positive tone has been set for ongoing business.

While MSP ecosystems of complementary service providers are extremely beneficial, in most cases one major function should remain under the control of each individual MSP organization: help desk and customer support. Customer support interactions are critical for growing customer relationships and to expand knowledge about different kinds of customers. It's also an opportunity to thoroughly document customer environments and conversations about business needs, to help these customers better utilize all MSP services now and in the future.

The information and data gained from all interactions with customers and users become the fuel for customer-focused analytics that help MSPs learn more about current and potential customers and the sorts of services that they want and need. Such detailed customer intelligence is an invaluable competitive edge.

 

But Who Owns the Customer Experience?

As illustrated by the Customer Centricity communication quadrant, MSPs would be smart to facilitate better communication with – and within – their client companies, to make sure the value of their services is obvious to the relevant customer and user roles.

MSPs must work to improve their own internal collaborations across functions to engender continuous high quality customer and user experiences. MSPs also need to implement ongoing analytics processes to generate and share customer insights across the organization.

Within the MSP organization, the responsibility for nurturing and shepherding ongoing customer experiences belongs to all teams that impact customers. At the core, much of the work should be accomplished by strong, continuously evolving collaborations between functional teams. To keep an agile customer focus, MSPs cannot afford to allow functional silos to exist within their organizations.

In the end, only the customer can own the customer experience – but MSPs have a great deal of power to enhance all customer interactions and the quality of services provided to clients.

 

Customer Image source: hudsonvalleynewsnetwork.com

 

 

This post was brought to you by IBM for Midsize Business and opinions are my own. To read more on this topic visit IBM's Midsize Insider. Dedicated to providing businesses with expertise, solutions and tools that are specific to small and midsized companies, the Midsize Business program provides businesses with the materials and knowledge they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

 

About the author: Julie Hunt understands the overlap and convergence of many business processes and software solutions that once were thought of as "separate" – and how this impacts software Vendors and Buyers, as well as the strategies that enterprises implement for how technology supports the business and its customers. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective

 

Customer Journeys Trump the Traditional Sales Cycle

                                Originally published on CMSWire

 

While pointless debate continues in organizations as to who "owns" the customer experience (the customer of course!), the responsibility for nurturing and shepherding the continuous customer experience belongs to all teams that impact customers. At the core, much of the work should be accomplished by strong, continuously evolving collaborations between marketing and sales. Unfortunately in many companies there are still ridiculous and harmful walls between sales and marketing – and a lot of political nonsense, mainly tied to the 'blame game' when forecasts aren't met and deals aren't closed.

In reality marketing and sales have intertwined roles for engendering positive outcomes from customer journeys, whether they realize it or not. But all too often the efforts of these roles are disjointed. Both groups should work together to serve customers in every sense. Sales and marketing teams already have highly complementary activities when it comes to customers – the effectiveness of these activities is amplified when these two teams deliberately work together.

To connect authentically to what customers need and want, customer journeys trump the traditional sales cycle. The sales cycle has been an inside-out process, tied primarily to sales goals and operations. The customer lifecycle with a company comprises an ongoing journey before, during and after individual sales events. Sales and marketing teams need to be part of continuous customer engagement for the entire journey. Persistent nurturing of customer experiences also plays an important role in customer retention and advocacy, and sales has a responsibility here.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Gary Magnone

 

 

The Customer Journey: Sketching Potential Experiences

There are organizations that still think that they can "design" customer experiences or regulate customer behavior. That's not ever going to happen, and it's a waste of time. The journey - the experiences - always belong to the customer, based on customer decisions. Many customer journeys are complex and erratic. Customer behavior can be unpredictable – journeys take twists and turns due to external influences and events beyond the organization. For one company and its products, there can be multiple customer / buyer journeys – just as there can be multiple customer categories and segments. It all depends on the products, how they are sold, the targets, and how well a company wants to interact with customers.

Customer journey square pegs cannot be hammered into company-desired round holes to fit inward-focused business processes. This is especially true for sales cycles or processes that only care about how a sales team wants to function – without any connection to how customers want to buy products and services. But organizations can design and orchestrate inspired and comprehensive support for customers across all internal functions and interaction channels anywhere. They can make sure that customers encounter consistent experiences anytime and that customers get what they need at any point in the journey.

Deep and broad customer understanding is necessary to: map customer journeys from customer perspectives; segment customers realistically; and comprehend customer needs and wants. Continuous customer intelligence is invaluable for nurturing better customer interactions that will make it easy for customers to buy from a company – and want to come back for more. Many current marketing processes provide what the sales team and others can put to good work: collections of customer action / transaction data, and the results of various analytics such as behavioral, social media and marketing automation.

Organizations also need to do a much better job of constructing integrated customer strategies at all levels, and should designate customer insight as a strategic core capability for the entire organization. Many companies still fall short on customer strategies, including specific customer experience strategic practices, as a recent Forrester study shows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Forrester Research

 

 

Aligning Sales Functions with the Customer Journey

Far too often organizations fail to:

• Understand customer journeys at all
• Connect sales process to customer journeys and to what marketing is doing to improve and nurture customer experiences
• Build content marketing approaches that support how the customer wants to buy and interact – and then interrelate sales process to these approaches

Too many organizations still only think in terms of the traditional sales cycle when considering sales interactions with customers – frequently with revenue as the main goal. There is little acknowledgement of what the customer needs or how the customer wants to do business. Of course revenue matters. But when the main focus of sales efforts shifts to the customer's journey, and the goal is positive customer experiences that can lead to purchases, revenue follows. When revenue is the main focus, the customer seems to disappear along with potential sales.

The customer journey at its core is about people learning about products, finding out how to buy, deciding if they want to buy, then buying or not. The right content plays a key role for many steps in the journey. The customer journey can also include: coming back multiple times, getting post-sales support, recommending products to friends and colleagues, "keeping in touch", and growing a relationship. So sales must be very much a part of all of this, especially in a world where many buyers may be halfway through (or more) their buying journeys before considering talking to sales.

 

 

 

                                            

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source: Forrester Research

 

 

 

Content Approaches that Serve Customers, Marketing and Sales

First and foremost content marketing must provide high quality content that potential customers want and need at different points of the customer journey. And that same content can align well with the needs of sales teams. But this will happen only if key elements of sales processes are mapped appropriately to the customer journey. The continuous exploration of customers and what they value throughout the customer journey points the way to the content that will deliver authentic value to customers and help to build trust in the vendor organization, particularly sales.

Sales teams want to take advantage of the same customer intelligence that greatly improves content, especially for targeted, highly personalized messages and information sharing. Intelligence delivered by behavioral analytics, marketing automation, and other customer-focused processes have parallel purposes to help both marketing and sales better engage and serve customers. And for content marketing to deliver timely and relevant information from the customer perspective, continuously updated customer intelligence is critical.

Content that answers customer questions about the business problems they face, or addresses their interests in certain types of products and services, is not only the right content for effective content marketing but also the right content for sales teams. Both sales and marketing will better engage customers with content that demonstrates a deep understanding of the customer's business, particularly when that content explores how to solve problems, improve operations or expand business reach. Content that pushes the current customer mindset while teaching new ideas for the business is highly effective.

Many customer journeys begin well in advance of an active search for solutions. Potential customers are often more receptive to exploring new thinking long before they have defined a problem or need. Content marketing opens the door to planting ideas in the back of customer minds, regarding potential business issues and opportunities, and new ways to handle them. Content that addresses topics of interest to specific customer segments has the strong potential to deliver unique value and increase meaningful engagement.

In many companies, sales teams don't put much time into current customers – until they want to sell them something new. Content marketing is a means to keep sales teams in touch with customers continuously after the sale, without having an overt ax to grind. Sales teams can make use of quality content to interact with customers and find out real information about their ever-changing needs and desires. The right content can be a great conversation starter – as long as sales teams sit back and listen to what customers have to say.

 

The Engaged Customer is the Glue of Marketing and Sales Success

It could be said that everyone in a company is in sales and marketing. But the better notion is that everyone is in the business of improving customer experiences to make it easier for customers to purchase and make use of products and services. Personalizing the journey before, during and after the sale needs the involvement of all levels of the organization, driven by a hierarchy of customer-focused strategies.

As with responsive marketing approaches, sales teams must abandon one-size-fits-all "sales cycles" and personalize interactions with prospects using continuously updated customer insight and sophisticated content marketing approaches. By truly interacting with customers throughout the customer lifecycle, sales teams should have a better understanding of when a customer is ready to purchase and what it will take to help them make the buying decision.

 

About the author: Julie is an independent consultant and industry analyst for B2B software solutions, providing services to vendors to improve strategies for customers and target markets, products and solutions, and future direction. Julie has expertise in several solution spaces including: data integration and data quality; analytics and BI; business process, workflow and collaboration; digital marketing, WCM and social media; and the pivotal importance of user and customer experiences. Julie shares her takes on the software industry via her blog Highly Competitiveand on Twitter: @juliebhunt For more information: Julie Hunt Consulting – Strategies for B2B Software Solutions: Working from the Customer Perspective