Some data insights retain their value. Like a packet of spaghetti sitting at the back of your kitchen shelf, they’ll be just as useful in three months’ time as they are right now. Some are more like fresh bread, becoming less useful with every passing day. And some data insights are like ice-cream cones in the blazing sunshine — leave them for more than a few minutes, and they stop being of any use at all.
This last category of highly time-sensitive data insights can be generated at any stage of the customer journey. By acting on them while they’re still relevant, organizations can drive customer acquisition, rescue abandoned purchases, and save failing customer relationships.
What’s more, they can gain a clear advantage over the majority of their peers.
Sixty-three percent of organizations say that while their data is readily available, it isn’t actionable in real time, according to a new survey of US-based business leaders by Forbes Insights and Acxiom. In fact, it takes most organizations days or weeks to move from insight to action.
This means most businesses are constantly letting valuable opportunities slip through their fingers, like so much melted ice cream.
When moving fast makes all the difference
To better understand what’s at stake, imagine someone shopping for a new coffee table on a furniture retailer’s website. The retailer knows that the shopper has put a table in their basket, begun to check out, and stalled on the delivery page.
If the retailer can act on this insight in the moment, it has a good chance of saving the sale — launching a live chat to answer the shopper’s questions, or offering them an appropriate discount. The longer the retailer takes to respond, the more likely it is that the shopper will have abandoned the purchase and bought the table from a competitor.
Scenarios like this, in which data insights go stale quickly, exist throughout the customer journey. During acquisition, there’s a short window to capitalize on high-intent behaviors like tapping an Instagram ad. Immediately after customers sign up, there’s a short window for SaaS providers and media streaming companies to address the teething problems that might cause users to bounce off their products and services.
It’s understandable, therefore, that business leaders rate activating real-time data among the most crucial capabilities for driving growth in the next few years, second only to developing interoperability across their platforms and identity systems.
When accuracy is what matters most
The smart strategy isn’t to build for real-time decision-making in every situation. After all, some data insights do have a much longer shelf life.
Imagine you’re a marketer at that same furniture retailer, working on customer segmentation. Does it matter whether you’re defining your high-value customers, occasional purchasers, and potential churners based on insights that were generated two seconds ago or two weeks ago? Almost certainly not. Does it matter if you haven’t successfully resolved customer identities and created a reliable view of behaviors and purchases across channels? Absolutely — that could seriously compromise your segmentation efforts.
In this and many other scenarios, the age of your data insight is of much less relevance than its accuracy and completeness. When you’re evaluating the performance of the marketing campaign you launched last week, it doesn’t matter whether your dataset captures engagement during the last hour. It only matters that the data for that given period is complete and correct.
The bottom line is this: businesses need to generate reliable data insights. And sometimes, they need to act on them fast. Both depend on putting the right data and identity foundation in place.
The shared genesis of fast, accurate decisions
First, businesses must address one of the primary reasons data-driven decision-making breaks down: technological silos. When data is fragmented across multiple systems and channels, data insights are harder to trust, generate, and act on.
Almost half of the business leaders surveyed (48%) said they lacked a single, trusted view of their customers. If businesses are to take timely, impactful, data-driven action, they need their 360-degree customer view to be a fully functioning, undeniable asset to their organization.
That means uniting first-party data across systems, resolving customer identities across devices and channels, and creating customer profiles that are clean, accurate, and up-to-date. It also means enriching first-party data with third-party insight — the kind that helps businesses understand their customers better.
As businesses build an interoperable, accessible, and enriched data foundation, they will also be building the ability to act on trusted information, in the moments that matter.
A nuanced data modernization strategy is key
Most businesses have already begun their journey towards modernizing their data and identity infrastructure. Sixty percent say their ability to connect data across systems and platforms is at least moderately mature, while 62% say their speed of decision-making has been at least moderately improved by their data modernization efforts.
It’s a good start, but there’s still much work to be done.
So far, only 35% report having significantly improved their CX outcomes. And when data modernization is done right, a business can expect to see strong outcomes across the board – from higher NPS scores, to stronger revenue growth.
The key to successful data modernization is nuance. As we’ve seen, sometimes real-time, data-driven decision-making can make all the difference. But sometimes, it simply isn’t necessary, or even desirable.
The best data and identity strategies recognize this. They make sure insights are always based on accurate, complete, enriched data. And they make sure the business can respond to them in the moment, if — and only if — a more timely response could lead to a better outcome.
In terms of our opening analogy? A great data and identity strategy makes sure your ice cream insights can be eaten before they melt, and your spaghetti insights aren’t being boiled unnecessarily, every minute of every day.
How to unlock your data potential: Read the report
Download the Forbes Insights and Acxiom report for a deeper dive into the findings of this new study. You’ll learn:
- How other organizations rate their own data and identity capabilities
- Where data-driven decision-making most frequently breaks down
- Why defining what “should be” must take priority over optimizing “what is”
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