Building a Data-Driven Organization: How to Overcome 3 Common Barriers to Using Customer Data Effectively

Building a Data-Driven Organization is a blog series developed in conjunction with the Treasure Data and Forbes Insights’ report Data Versus Goliath: Customer Data Strategies to Disrupt the Disruptors. It provides actionable advice about how organizations can transform into customer data-driven enterprises.

A joint survey we conducted with Forbes Insights found that only 13% of enterprise organizations can be considered “leaders” in using customer data effectively. However, it’s becoming increasingly clear that taking advantage of your customer data is crucial to building an innovative customer experience and disrupting industries.

While most of the 400 marketing, customer experience, and data analytics executives we surveyed understand the benefits associated with using customer data effectively, they cite specific barriers that prevent them from creating a data-driven culture.

What are your greatest challenges to moving to a customer data-driven culture?

In this post, we’ll discuss these challenges and show you how to overcome them for data-driven success.

Issue 1: Dirty Data Dissuades People from Using the Data

Data that’s incomplete or out of date isn’t worth using. When data is coming in from all angles it’s hard to keep it clean.

In order to truly understand their customer experience, companies must integrate and cross-reference all their data sources, including point of sale, the web, SaaS, mobile, offline, batch, streaming, events, and, increasingly, IoT devices.

When all these data sources are unified, companies can track the journey of every individual customer, and make important personalization and targeting decisions to improve the customer experience.

Data unification also helps organizations keep customer records clean and comprehensive, so information is always actionable. One of our clients, a large consumer products company, had 150 million customer profiles across multiple lists. Only a third of these profiles were actionable, but when the data was consolidated and synced via our enterprise CDP, marketing had about 10 million new leads from data they weren’t able to leverage before. The ability to market to these new leads is expected to generate up to $20 million in new revenue.

With an enterprise CDP, consolidating your data, making it accessible, and keeping it clean is easier than you might think. While you’ll likely need to coordinate with your IT team to understand the integration capabilities of the systems you’re currently using, once that’s accomplished your CDP will be able to take over the process of importing and maintaining your data. This will give you easy access to real-time information that’s always up-to-date, giving you better results.

Issue 2: Employees Don’t Feel Empowered to Use Data

Our Forbes Insights survey shows that while 81% of executives use customer data to guide their decision-making, only 26% of staff employees work with customer data on a regular basis. Of the enterprises where employees do have access, only 14% have full autonomy to act on data insights without management oversight.

This goes against the finding that 54% of executives want to empower employees and reward them for identifying and acting on opportunities identified through analytics, and that 47% want all employees to become data analysts with fewer lines of authority.

Clearly, executives understand the need to give people who execute marketing campaigns and sell products and services access to real-time data, but they’re not really doing it.

At Treasure Data, we’re big proponents of using a sales and marketing data dashboard to provide the most relevant data to the people who need it most. Having the all useful data in one place—and with at-a-glance visibility—makes it easy for our sales and marketing teams to monitor pipeline metrics and see how our campaigns are working.

Our teams use the dashboard every single day to make immediate course corrections, optimize future customer journeys, and report to upper management on the health of our company.

Issue 3: Inability to Measure Value/ROI

If you’re not using data to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) that map to strategic business objectives, then it’s impossible to see how the use of data can improve your bottom line.

The Treasure Data and Forbes Insights survey reveals that a majority of organizations are turning to enterprise CDPs to solve these issues. A total of 78% of responding companies either have, or are developing, dedicated CDP environments in their marketing departments.

A significant number of the executives surveyed report positive results from their CDPs:

• 40% expect their CDP to meet disruptive and competitive challenges within the next two years.
• 49% of leaders expect to see a major shift toward competitive advantage in the same timeframe.
• 44% report that their CDP is helping drive loyalty and ROI.

An enterprise CDP’s ROI is directly connected to using customer data to improve the customer experience. Companies use our enterprise CDP to increase conversion rates, build loyalty, increase per-customer revenue, and acquire new customers. Here are just few typical examples of how our CDP gets results:

• In a single campaign, Subaru used our enterprise CDP to generate a 15% conversion rate increase—and $26 million in sales.
• By using our CDP to improve targeting and personalization, lifestyle retailer Muji increased in-store revenue by 46%.
• Shiseido, the multinational cosmetics company, uses the Treasure Data enterprise CDP to increase customer retention and saw an overall increase in revenue of 11 percent after one year.

To learn how to get similar results, download our new white paper, “The ROI in a Customer Data Platform.” It’s designed to show you what’s possible when you can get a good handle on your data, and will help you make the business case for an enterprise CDP in your organization.

Download the paper now and start blasting through the barriers that prevent you from using customer data to generate revenue growth.