Why Is Data Democratization Important for Business Success?

Historically for organizations, customer data was always gated by a select few technical individuals, despite the fact that these insights are critical to the work of the greater organization. Without self-serve, direct access to data, marketers and business users typically need to go through IT or a third-party vendor to get what they’re looking for. Completing these requests can take days or even weeks, slowing business agility and ultimately hurting revenue. Today, businesses must be more agile than ever and organizations are looking for intuitive, self-service tools that can get them the information they need when they need it.   

Open data means access for all, not a select few

Pulling the customer data you need shouldn’t be as painful as pulling teeth. When data is not accessible throughout all sides of a business, it greatly limits the speed of innovation and leaves the direction of the business to the mercy of data analysts who have competing priorities. That means that marketers may not be able to see the impact of certain campaigns until it is far too late to act on it. Waiting for other teams to relay the information rather than just pulling the reports themselves means that business users and data analysts get stuck in a back-and-forth loop of questions that require deeper context and analysis. This hurts business productivity by taking time away from the high-value tasks that both of these departments should be focusing on. For busy executives that also want to understand the impact of their initiatives succinctly without having to dig through multiple reports and presentations from dozens of teams, data tools with visual, intuitive dashboards provide a high-level snapshot of the impact of these efforts. 

Rather than play telephone with how your data is communicated across the organization, every team and department within the company should be operating off the same data set, so discrepancies or misaligned priorities are avoided. When teams trust their data it builds greater trust for each other and ensures that things like data governance, privacy and compliance are prioritized. These guard posts for data governance are particularly important with the rise of data privacy legislations like CCPA and GDPR intended to protect consumers personal information. Businesses can drive a culture of data accessibility with a customer data platform (CDP).  

Empower data-driven outcomes with self-service tools 

Today, marketing is more focused on tying their efforts to revenue and customer outcomes. With these increased responsibilities comes the need to give marketers greater control over how they act on customer insights. A CDP gives marketers a direct line of sight into customer profiles, so they can more accurately segment and target customers with certain messages. 

Marketers are experts in speaking the language of the customer and a customer data platform needs to deliver customer intelligence in the same way. Turning data into meaningful data-driven campaigns requires a streamlined user interface and the ability to pull ad-hoc reports as they’re needed. Features like cohort analysis tools are also valuable for allowing marketing teams to zoom in on different customer segments and understand the ROI and impact of different campaigns over time. 

By cutting out the middle men and putting those responsible for campaign creation front and center, these self-service insights can be acted on faster and used to identify new trends and hidden opportunities that could have otherwise gotten lost. In the process of diving deep into their own campaign results, marketing departments can often discover unexpected insights or gaps in their current strategy, creating an environment where employees are more data curious and proactively seek out alternative ways to propel innovation. 

What is the impact of data democratization?

Improving access to data benefits organizations by helping organizations operate smarter and faster. Organizations can be more agile and be more informed with how they approach customer interactions across the entire customer lifecycle. For example, brands like Arcelik have seen success using a customer data platform for their call centers and customer success reps. Without visibility into a customer’s relationship with a brand, these reps often need to have customers repeat information about themselves, leading to a frustrating and inefficient interaction on both sides. However, by using the customer insights from Acquia CDP to provide more context for inquiries, Arcelik representatives could provide more effective service and resolve issues faster.  

Data democratization and the power to bring machine learning models to marketing also improves business agility and fosters long-term customer loyalty. Clothing brand PVH also leveraged a customer data platform to give their marketing and communication teams more complete access to data in order to help them share and scale knowledge across the company. A centralized data foundation allows regional managers to communicate effectively across different lines of business and stay abreast of corporate information. These machine learning tools and data sharing capabilities also grant business intelligence teams the flexibility to slice and dice data to get the reports they need alongside other sources of data, such as merchandising and warehouse data.

Taking a data-first approach helps guide organizations to invest their time and resources into initiatives that will reap the highest value, whether that’s more easily identifying engaged customers, accelerating timelines or discovering critical insights. Businesses are sitting on a treasure chest of data and having an accessible data platform that can be used by everyone who needs it is the key to unlocking a wealth of knowledge.

Discover how creating a culture of data democratization can bring value to your whole organization in our e-book: Data Democratization: Giving Employees and Customers What They Want.