Businesses are facing a critical challenge looking forward with how to manage data their data to remain competitive to emerge as leaders in their fields.
CEOs are saying they need to align their digital strategy with every line of business to accelerate time to market, time to revenue and time to customer satisfaction while remaining compliant.
Kevin Cochrane, CMO at OpenText, is saying that the way to do this is to manage a company’s structured and unstructured information to drive key business processes and mobilize those into new omnichannel experiences, not just for customers but employees and partners as well.
Cochrane told CBR that businesses can remain competitive in the data age by following these 3 basic steps:
STEP 1: Ground business strategy in customer experience
Customer experience is what can help inform how different lines of your business need to transform their functions.
So when you’re thinking about strategy, think not only how you acquire customers through traditional digital marketing as you would have done in 2008, but how you drive deep customer engagement across their entire lifecycle and every single interaction point they have with you.
When you can map out who customers are, what their lifecycle is, their engagement patterns over time, then you can look at how can you empower your employees to deliver better brand experience across the sales and service function.
You can recognise different points in the customer lifecycle as opportunities to sell them something new. That can then inform your manufacturing and R&D team what a customer likes and dislikes and use that to feed internal collaboration and ideation to get products to market quicker than your competitors.
STEP 2: Design a road map based on customer data
Once you have put in place the first step of establishing a strategy, it can really inform you on the second step of creating a roadmap for which functions and which interactions with customer are going to be first steps in terms of transforming the entire customer journey and experience.
Step two is where data comes in from taking all of that information and putting in place a detailed road map where you can look at function by function, interaction by interaction to change way you as an organization are responding to customers and reacting to market demand.
STEP 3: Interact with your supply chain through EIM systems
You need to look holistically not just at your business, but how you interact with the entire supply chain.
At the end of the day, you don’t create new products in a vacuum, so you need to empower an extended enterprise to go outside your four walls to participate in your key business processes and leverage all this core business information to help you speed time to market.
This information can be leveraged through an effective enterprise information management (EIM) system, which brings data all the data together.
The top layer of stack helps you rapidly build and deploy rapid social applications that expose key information to help people get the job done by providing contextually relevant information to give people insight to help them take action on any device anywhere they are.
Below that are business process management tools to manage customer lifecycle as a business process, all of that is orchestrated by a BTM engine.
The next layer below that is core content management and information management – managing every piece of structured content in the enterprise in one holistic way. This single source of proof allows a 360⁰ view of your product, customers and business.
