The customer experience(CX) is at the core of every business decision. Whether upgrading your existing system or developing new applications, CX is crucial for organizations to reap financial benefits and strategically improve loyalty and advocacy. Some of the factors that contribute to CX significantly are,
- Resolution
- Expectations
- Personalizations
- Time and efforts
- Integrity
Out of these, most of the factors need data procurement and analytics to improve the CX, and that is where you may have to re-think your database management strategy. According to a survey by McKinsey, 93 percent of CX leaders use a survey-based metric like customer satisfaction score that needs analysis and massive data storage.
So, you need a reliable database management system to manage the massive amount of data and integrate advanced analytical functions. A possible solution is to migrate your data to a cloud-based service that offers scalability, flexibility, and data integrity.
Database migration is moving data from one platform to another for different reasons like upgrading legacy systems, the need for more storage, and advanced integrations. Here, we will discuss why data migration is an excellent solution for successful CX? But, before we do that, let’s discuss the process of data migration.
What is Database Migration?
It is a multi-phase process that includes data assessments, schema conversions if needed, data migrations, testing, and other steps. There are several reasons to migrate databases from one platform to another. For example, it can reduce operational costs, upgrade to a cloud environment from legacy systems, and even automate specific repetitive tasks.
Maintaining rich CX needs data aggregation, analytics, and personalization of services based on such analysis. So, migrating your database to the cloud can be beneficial for efficient data handling and advanced analytics. Let’s discuss other benefits of why migrating data to a cloud-based service is essential for successful CX.
Benefits of database migration for enhanced CX
From better communication to the personalization of services, it can support your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems in many ways.
Communicating with customers
Most businesses that use contact centers and custom experience apps can leverage cloud-based services. This allows them to modernize their architecture as per the demand.
Cloud-based CCaaS has seen a massive surge due to the need for modernization by many companies. It is why cloud contact center adoption saw a 10.3% increase in 2020 compared to 2019. With a cloud-based contact center, you can achieve,
- Easier integration of cloud services for customer communication
- Enhanced response time with the ability to scale according to communication traffic
- Ability to allocate crucial resources to strategic functions for improvement of customer engagement
- Communication data aggregation, analytics, and enhancement of interactions with customers
- Effective management of different channels of communication like calls, text messaging, emails, and others
However, migration is just one part of what you will need to leverage cloud-based CCaaS. Several aspects are associated with cloud-based CCaaS, like hosting services, API development, custom features development, etc. Furthermore, enhancing communication is just the first step towards improving the CX, as you will also need a resolution to their issues and help them maximize usage of your services.
Data-driven Resolutions
Resolutions to customer issues need enough data to offer excellent solutions. As the paradigm shift of connected enterprises comes to fruition, more and more businesses are using insights-driven strategies. Such insights are generated through advanced analytics algorithms that need customer data for pattern identification and training purposes.
By migrating your data to a cloud-based environment, you can leverage features like data attribution recommendations that help structure your data for better insights. In addition, it allows you to store data related to products, stores, and users into different classes using text, numbers, or other input categories.
What Is Data Attribute Recommendation? – SAP Help Portal
For example, CRM Automation services from SAP offers data attribute recommendations applications. It includes,
- Data manager app for management of data related to algorithm’s training
- Model manager app to help with the management of Machine learning models through development, deployment, and termination
- Inferences to classify data records
Through AI-based analytics powered through cloud computing, you can enhance the resolution rate of customer issues. However, using these advanced analytics programs in an on-premise infrastructure setup is challenging due to compatibility issues, hardware restrictions, and scalability problems. So, migrating your data to the cloud is the best option to generate data-driven resolutions for your customer support systems.
Balancing expectations
Maintaining the economic value and meeting the customer expectations simultaneously for better CX is often termed “Value Engineering.”
Customer experience is a new reality (assets. KPMG)
So, why do you need value engineering?
As you can see above, the economic value (sales and revenue) and meeting customer expectations are interconnected. Therefore, one can conclude here that we need to have a strategy that ensures lower operational costs and at the same time meet customer expectations. In such cases, cloud-based services are best because they offer a pay-per-use pricing model which reduces overhead costs keeping the economic value optimal.
Maintaining Integrity
Data integrity is one of the essential parts of modern business operations. According to a KPMG report, 55 percent of customers excerpt businesses to keep their data safe. While on-premise infrastructure is not always vulnerable to data leaks, there are problems with upgrading capabilities. These monolithic systems often lag in averting modern security threats due to a lack of modernized solutions.
With the migration of your data to cloud-based environments, you can leverage advanced services for better integrity and security. However, it is crucial to create security policies across the system to ensure data integrity.
Personalizations
Personalizing services of products for customers needs a massive amount of user data with advanced algorithms to analyze and recommend customized insights. For example, an Amazon recommendation engine will use your buying patterns as a training reference and generate personalized product suggestions. First, however, you need to understand the difference between personalization and customization. Both need data to offer rich CX, but while personalization does not involve customers directly, customizations require users’ participation for tailor-made services.
Machine learning algorithms need higher computational power, and that is where cloud-managed services can be an advantage. In addition, migrating your data to cloud services makes more sense due to features like auto-scaling and support for advanced analytics.
Conclusion
Customer experience is an ever-changing paradigm due to changes in buyer patterns and market demands. Predicting CX is difficult for any business as several variables can affect a customer’s journey. Database migrations to cloud are a step further towards maximizing customer experience through cloud services. It will help you optimize different factors that affect CX and enable you to improve your operational efficiency.
