Solve digital transformation’s 5 most pervasive issues — with Lytics Conductor

Digital transformation isn’t working. That’s as bold a statement as it is a true one. 

Less than five years ago, of the $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformation, roughly $900 billion was wasted on initiatives that didn’t meet their intended goals. But for most businesses, it wasn’t for lack of trying. 

Today, many are still failing to complete their digital transformation because they’ve gone into it with misinformed direction, with unrealistic expectations, and/or without a toolkit to support the transition. Some even begin their transformation and give up along the way, accepting that connecting, unifying, and activating their data has simply become too costly, time-consuming, and complicated.

Here’s the good news. Building the foundation of digital transformation —creating a unified customer data set that you can use across your business— isn’t the impossible task that it once was.  There is a path to get there.

First things first: why is everyone racing to transform their business?

Digital transformation is mission critical for every business. Winning and retaining customers in today’s digital world requires more insight into your customer’s wants and needs, and the ability to take action on those insights. Competing today requires a new data-driven approach, where customer data is the foundation to making each customer moment more relevant and more valuable than the last.  

Modern customers have sky-high expectations and a low tolerance threshold. Brands know this, and recognize the risk at play: the loss of their once-loyal customers. They are hoping and trying their best to deliver on modern consumer demands. But many are held back by legacy technology, by a lack of modern tools to bridge the CX gap within their organization, or by a mess of customer data that’s near impossible to sort through, connect, and actually use.

According to Forbes, the truth is that:

• For nearly 3 in 10 brands, digital transformation is a matter of survival.
• Fifty-five percent of companies without a digital transformation believe they have less than a year before they start to lose market share.
• And among those companies that haven’t started their digital transformation, 59% fear it might be too late.

The silver lining? Digital transformation is a long game — and that’s okay. Thirty-nine percent of executives believe their companies will get the most value from digital transformation initiatives in three to five years. 

So, if you’re willing to put in the time and do the legwork to get it right, here’s how you get started.

Sidestepping digital transformation challenges starts with preparing ahead

Digital transformation isn’t a single-purpose investment. It’s not —and shouldn’t be— exclusively about driving revenue, or enabling your marketing team, or just about collecting and managing customer data.  . 

If you asked a few business executives (who often have a broad, 10,000-foot view of their business), why digital transformation matters, they’d be thinking a lot bigger. In fact, improved operational efficiency, faster time to market, and the ability to meet customer expectations top digital transformation’s list of advantages for nearly 40% of business leaders.

Here are a few of the key challenges to avoid (including some tips on exactly how to do that).

1. There are too many data silos. 

New channels, old channels, digital, offline, applications… How do you possibly collect and manage all this data in real-time? Unfortunately, lots of brands struggle to, which means, if this sounds familiar, you may have an incomplete view of the customers you think you know.  Connectivity of customer data —the ability to collect, manage and activate data at scale— is the foundation of digital transformation. And it all starts with breaking down data silos so you can gain a more complete view of and deeper insights into your customers. 

2. Identity resolution can be complex. 

Omnichannel behavior is constant among today’s customers. That means brands are tasked with understanding consumers across platforms and channels: which means resolving identities across tens of identifiers and managing de-duplication. It means managing new, changing identifiers and updating merge rules to create a unified view of your customer with 100% accuracy — even in the face of continuous updates to your data and your consumer’s behavior. But it’s not always easy. 

MarketingProfs estimates that even a brand’s most loyal customers likely have at least six different identities within their marketing system. Companies need a better way to manage and update their customer data schema, build an identity graph, and manage identity resolution and merge rules to reflect changing business needs.  

3. Data quality is a major problem. 

If you can’t trust your own customer data, you lack confidence when making decisions. A bad decision could be as small as annoying a customer with an irrelevant offer, or as large as running an expensive, big-budget campaign targeting a new cohort of people, all of whom you have incorrect insight into. Companies need real-time visibility into their customer data pipeline, alerting, monitoring and access to data management tools that help improve the accuracy of customer profiles and the overall quality of and confidence in your data. 

4. Your data isn’t actionable. 

Lots of customer data at your disposal sounds like a great problem to have, until it’s impossible to sort through, connect, or actually use any of it. We call that data overload. If your customer data isn’t informing the way you do business, you’re not getting value out of it. Sound familiar? Consider how much you’re spending on resources and tooling to gather and manage your data, and you may think twice about sitting on passive data.  

The value in collecting and unifying your customer data is achieved when you are able to use it, to activate your customer data and deliver better experiences that serve your customer’s needs. Making your actionable requires a new type of system – where your customer data is connected to your activation channels and you are able to empower your teams to use data to intelligently inform the customer experience. 

5. Data privacy and security are critical, but have created uncertainty on how to proceed.

Every company must adapt to the new privacy and security environment, which means that every company needs to be able to collect and process customer data in a secure, privacy-centric way. This means it needs to be based on consent and the ability to provide more transparency into the data and the process. 

Privacy now requires that companies understand data residency and what it means to be a data controller or leverage a data processor to manage their customer data.  Privacy has balkanized customer data and created new rules for how we collect and store customer data in each region, and it’s critical that companies have the flexibility to store data in any region, to deploy their customer data platform in a single or multi-tenant environment, and even to be able to deploy in their own cloud.  

Fortunately, there’s a solution.

Lytics Conductor: Do more with your data

Instead of trying to cobble together outdated tech, or have your engineering team spend all their time building and maintaining a real-time customer data pipeline, you can now take a more holistic approach with Lytics Conductor. 

Take control of your customer data. Transform your business from a laggard in customer data to an efficient data-powered machine. Create a unified view of your customers & take action on your insights. Get in front of your customers. And do it all with ease.

What can you do with Conductor?

• Collect data from anywhere
• Build a standardized customer data schema
• Manage and customize your schema as your data changes
• Create your identity graph
• Manage identity resolution and merge rules
• Build a complete view of your data and your customer
• Take action on your data across all your channels

The new, modern Composable CDP for a future-proof data stack

Lytics helps you manage all of your customer data in real-time, and in the way you want it. It’s accessible to your organization and teams and fully secure. Get an accurate, up-to-date, and complete view of your customer that continues to improve as you add data sources and break down silos. It’s reusable and actionable across all your channels and tools: creating the customer data source of truth that your business can run on. 

Now you can future proof your data strategy and digital transformation initiative with a modern, modular CDP that fits into your data stack, rather than one that forces you to rip and replace everything you’ve already built. Your stack, your way. The next generation of customer profiles and CDP has arrived.