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    Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers

    Knowledge-intensive organizations increasingly struggle to unlock the potential value associated with the variety, volatility and volume of knowledge and information both within and external to their organizations (often termed Big Data), fragmented among myriad cloud and on-premise systems. With the failure of traditional knowledge management programs of the past, which often attempted to contain knowledge in a single database, organizations increasingly look to new technologies to leverage data where it resides, so that each employee can know what the organization knows, as well as who in the organization knows it. Here are five ways, identified by Coveo, that organizations can unlock the value in all their data and information to become more knowledgeable about, and therefore more relevant to, their customers.

    Five Ways to Use Data to Be More Relevant to Customers - slide 1

    Click through for five ways organizations can unlock the value in all their data and information to become more knowledgeable about and therefore more relevant to their customers, as identified by Coveo.

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    Connect

    Big Data can enable companies to be more relevant to their customers, but only when they can connect the dots between the data — that is, to reach into all enterprise systems, whether they are in the cloud or on-premise, and including social sites that may have information about their customers and products. Just as Google reaches into all websites, organizations need to be able to reach into and crawl all of their systems, but with one big difference — they must do it securely.

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    Unify

    Once all of the data has been connected (and keep in mind security privileges), it can be unified, in an index that is always on, always updating the data. Be careful that the index doesn’t take up too much space; it should have a much smaller footprint than the original sources, because you’re not moving data, you’re just capturing a facsimile of it. Once unified, you can uncover information relationships among fragmented data from multiple different sources. This is where the magic begins.

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    Contextualize

    Know what your employees are working on? Know their past behaviors, interests and expertise? What about your customers? Do you know what they own and what they might like to purchase next, or what challenges they’re having? All of this information exists in your systems and communications, and both employees and customers leave traces that provide context, in everything they do. Now you can match up the unified data with the context of the employee and customer.

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    Engage

    With all of your content unified, matched with the context of your employees and customers, you can bring content into context. If it’s a customer, they may be on your customer portal. Now, you can serve them up information that is relevant to them: about the products they own, their cases, interests, challenges and needs. And it’s the same for your employees. If they work in a system of record, keep them there – but bring the unified, contextualized content to them, when and where they need it, based on what they’re working on. Or, let them engage with contextual data, via their own interface, that they can personalize. Now we’re engaging with the data, in our context, and maybe without even asking for it!

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    Tune

    When people engage with contextual data, they again leave traces of what they prefer, how they work, what they need, what’s useful and what’s not useful. Even what’s missing! You can feed this information right back into your data with usage analytics for ever more relevant data experiences. Suddenly, your employees know what your company knows, securely, when and where they need to know it, in and relevant to their context. On any device, in any system, from any combination of systems. Now when they engage with customers, they’ll always be relevant.

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