How prepared is your data to help you build customer engagements?

In the last post - We shared some thoughts around utilizing some tools to help you build customer engagements in today's digital world.

If tools are like Organs then Data is like Blood and Tissue - In this post, we will outline certain areas to help you leverage from a clean, lean and a compliant digital customer engagement strategy.

There are several aspects which are worth considering, before one starts to expect the required impact on the ROI's from their technical investments - Let's take a look at these data components:

a) Data Quality: This has been amongst us since Dinosaurs years and a lot of tools have been designed to help organizations cleanse their dirty data, making sure it complies with standards such as consistency, conformity etc. Yet organizations fail to leverage from a 100% accurate data to fuel there digital platforms and one of the major reason is: This work requires a dedicated human / machine effort and this should be a recurring process.

b) Data Governance: No one likes to reinvest in resources to cleanse the mess again - Hence solid data governance principles help in keeping the core clean.

c) Data Archiving: Not only keeping the old customer records in your production systems, quickly occupies the storage space but this could also expose you to data privacy specific challenges. Imagine a CRM, carrying personal information of a customer who made some transaction with the business 10 years ago, could expose the business to Data Privacy concerns - Hence set up a practice to ensure old data which has surpassed retention timeframes, gets archived periodically.

d) Data Privacy: Modern customer engagement tools, provide avenues to help you ensure either you do not collect any personal information OR if you do then the same remains within the context of your customer's consent. Despite all of these - It does make a lot of sense, to have a full time data privacy officer who could keep a tab on ensuring data privacy standards are being followed and this also helps in building trust with the customers.

e) Data Security: This is the foundation and a lot has already been said on this topic :) but this should be the first and the foremost area of consideration, before building a canvas of a digital customer engagement strategy.

So how prepared is your data to take up the next challenge?