Customer data is the No. 1 focus of enterprise data strategies

New research from Tamr reveals that more than three-fourths (78%) of surveyed businesses focus on improving customer data quality and breaking down data silos. And many organizations are shifting from being solely data-driven to seeking value from the promise that their customer data holds. These findings are based on a recent study of businesses across a variety of industry sectors, including financial services, retail, manufacturing, and life sciences. 

Customer data has become a key focus in light of ever-evolving customer preferences and behaviours. With both B2B and B2C customers expecting a seamless experience, it's become clear that improving the value of customer data is vital to any business's success. But when customer data is incorrect, incomplete, or outdated, it becomes difficult to derive value from it. 

Dirty customer data: what it is and why it exists 

Most companies' customer data is messy, incomplete, incorrect, and managed in data silos, making it difficult to integrate into a holistic, 360-degree view of the customer. Typically, organizations manage their data in a way which aligns to how they are organized – by product line, by geography, by business unit, etc. But, the real value from data comes when organizations break down those silos. Without that holistic view, the individuals in the company responsible for identifying and driving upsell/cross-sell opportunities, delivering world-class customer experiences, and identifying potential risk exposures will struggle to succeed. 

"With regards to customer data, changing customer buying behaviour created an influx of data for businesses to comb through," said Anthony Deighton, Data Products General Manager at Tamr. "Companies leading the pack in winning buyers and increasing customer loyalty are doing so by solving the customer data problem."

Data is everyone’s concern  

Tamr research participants were primarily from data and analytics teams and business departments, such as marketing, procurement, and customer experience. The high survey participation rate (64%) from business departments demonstrates that data is becoming a part of everyone’s job in the enterprise. And as organizations become more data driven, data products are rising as a primary focus to enable organizations to realize the value of data as a core asset.  

Data products: an antidote to dirty, disconnected customer data

Companies that have shifted their focus to data products are overcoming customer data problems and delivering outstanding results. Data products are easy-to-use sets of high-quality, trustworthy, and accessible data that people across an organization can use to solve business challenges. Tamr’s research shows that 69% of respondents cited business value as a key metric for measuring the success of data products, second only to user experience. In fact, 74% of respondents would advise companies wanting to solve customer data problems to develop a data product strategy that focuses on business value.

“Treating data like a product involves bringing structure to the ownership, processes, and technology needed to ensure the organization has clean, curated, continuously-updated data,” Deighton explained. “Organized by business entities and governed by domain, data products are the best version of data. They are aligned to key business entities and available for humans and machines to consume broadly and securely across an enterprise to solve business challenges.” 

Building data products 

A templated approach to data product development is the simplest way to accelerate time to value for organizations wanting to move toward a data product strategy. Data product templates enable you to build a custom flow for your MDM program quickly, author and curate data, and improve data quality for your operational processes, analytics, and data consumers. Data product templates address wide-ranging data challenges, from B2B and B2C customer mastering to supplier mastering and legal entity mastering, so any organization seeking better, more efficient ways to manage their data can benefit from this approach. 

“Our research indicates that businesses that have moved away from being data-driven only, and adopted data product strategies to become value-driven, are the real success stories,” says Deighton.