As enterprises embark on their digital transformation journey, transforming customer experience has emerged as the north star guiding this journey and ensuring focus on the right set of priorities. Enterprises are engaging with their customers across multiple channels – physical, web, mobile, social media, IoT – generating a vast digital exhaust of data. Enterprises have realized that unlocking value from this data is the key to transforming customer experience. Immense computing and storage resources are being used to process this data and generate business insights. With more data being gathered on more customers across more channels, the promised land of perfect customer understanding to deliver just the right experience at the right time to each customer seems within reach. Unfortunately for far too many enterprises, this remains a distant promise rather than reality. Why is that the case?
A trifecta of forces have made this a daunting challenge for most enterprises. First, there’s been an explosion in the volume and variety of data. It’s big data and fast customer data from an increasing and ever-changing set of data sources – transaction data, machine sensor data, website clickstream, social media feeds, logs and location data. Second, there’s unrelenting business pressure to use this data from different types of users to address a plethora of customer analytics needs, ranging from real-time personalization of web experience to weekly campaign planning and longer-term demand forecasting. And they all want quick access to relevant data in a self-serve model without relying on IT to provision the data for them. Finally, there’s increasing scrutiny on data privacy and security and the need to comply with new regulations like GDPR. Developing trusted customer relationships requires that enterprises are being seen as ethical custodians of customer data. It requires a tough balancing act to manage this at enterprise scale without compromising business agility.
The first step in addressing this confluence of forces is developing a comprehensive understanding of what data you have across the enterprise. The data landscape is complex and constantly evolving with data assets of different types distributed across cloud data stores, on-premise databases, varied business applications and unstructured documents. Enterprises need the ability to scan these data assets across the enterprise, and intelligently catalog, tag and classify the data for visibility and understanding. They have to make relevant data easily discoverable for non-technical business users. They have to improve trust and confidence in the data for analytics by helping users understand where the data came from, and providing appropriate business context and visibility into the quality and accuracy of the data.
Addressing these needs requires an intelligent AI-powered data catalog that delivers automated discovery, curation and classification of data at enterprise scale. An intelligent data catalog is the foundation of comprehensive data visibility and puts enterprises on the path towards enabling improved customer experience and trust. Master data initiatives, which are critical to delivering better customer engagement, can be streamlined by making it easier to identify and prioritize relevant data sources used to enrich master data. Analysts can be intelligently guided to trusted and relevant data for their customer analytics needs. Data governance and compliance teams are supported by understanding what data is available, where its located, where its coming from and its quality.
Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog is able to do all of this in a large global enterprise with hundreds of thousands of datasets that are growing and changing on a daily basis, hundreds of applications that hold customer data and power customer interactions, and hundreds of analysts who need immediate access to all of this data for customer analytics. To learn more about how Informatica’s Enterprise Data Catalog provides the holistic visibility and understanding of data required to transform customer experience, register for one of our Virtual Launch events:
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