Post-M&A Customer 360 use cases illustrate the complex challenge of aggregating and organizing data. Read on to see how a data product approach can help.
Table of Contents
What is Customer 360?
Post-M&A Customer 360 Challenges
Post-Merger Customer 360 Use Case Example
Post-Acquisition Customer 360 Use Case Example
Handle Your Customer 360 Use Cases with Speed and Agility
Customer 360 refers to delivering a single, complete, and trusted view of a customer – including master, transaction, and interaction data, to all authorized data consumers. It serves various stakeholders in the organization, such as sales, marketing, customer care, product, and more.
Enterprises today view Customer 360 as vital to providing a personalized, consistent, and competitive customer experience and enhancing key business metrics. In the context of a merger or acquisition, having the ability to combine and unify customer data is essential.
In this article, we’ll cover different Customer 360 use cases, related challenges, and how an agile Customer 360 approach – driven by data products – can help you overcome them.
Following a merger or acquisition, the companies involved have a strong imperative to achieve a consolidated, accurate view of their shared customer base. As formerly disparate entities – each with their own legacy systems, cloud-based services, third-party vendors, data formats, terminologies, technologies, and more – they must now combine and standardize their customer data into one unified form.
This objective is as challenging as it gets. Here are the 7 biggest challenges faced by a new entity after a merger or acquisition:
Definition consensus
Dynamic data masking provides enterprises with the flexibility to define which data should be masked, and how it should be masked (partially or fully), based on roles and permissions.
Quality assurance
In the wake of a merger or acquisition, the typical challenges of continuous data integration, extraction, unification, and preparation often become even more complex. As a result, it can be difficult to meet the data quality requirements required for fulfilling Customer 360 use cases.
Data integration
The challenges of extracting and integrating customer data across fragmented, inconsistent, and siloed systems, are multiplied in a M&A scenario.
Data freshness
As the amount of data, and data sources, increases, so does the challenge of keeping the Customer 360 view fresh and up-to-date.
Scale and speed
Highly fragmented data sources originating in formerly separate companies make it difficult to extract, integrate, and deliver trusted customer data to business users quickly and at scale.
Time to market
In the wake of a merger or acquisition, the new entity typically needs to meet aggressive timelines to keep customer service up to par, and to be able to cross-sell and up-sell to the newly consolidated customer base.
Regulatory compliance
Remaining compliant with local and international privacy regulations can complicate efforts to integrate, move, and share customer data with business users.
A great example of a successful post-merger Customer 360 use case is the complete customer data integration between Pelephone, Bezeq, and Yes, dubbed “Project Alpha.”
Together, Pelephone, Yes and Bezeq International provide cellular, satellite TV, VoIP, and international calling services to nearly 4.5 million customers in Israel. Once they merged, they set out to deploy a unified CRM solution for their customer care operations under the unified Alpha brand. The Alpha team needed a flexible, technology-agnostic customer data management platform that could simplify the integration of many different data sources, technologies, and formats, and deliver unified customer data in real time.
Despite the complexities of creating a unified customer data view from disparate backend systems and massive volumes of customer data, the Alpha team was able to fulfill their goals using a Customer Data Hub (CDH).
The CDH seamlessly connected to the data sources from all three operators to provide a unified customer perspective. As a result, the Alpha data team created 120 automated data services to deliver seamless, bi-directional integration of all customer data to a shared Salesforce CRM in less than 6 months.
After acquiring Israeli Internet provider Netvision, Cellcom, a leading communications and media company in Israel, needed a way to extend its excellent customer experience to its now combined customer base.
As a newly combined entity, Cellcom’s customer data was fragmented over dozens of enterprise applications and data sources, making it nearly impossible to obtain a trusted, comprehensive, real-time view of its customers. Moreover, its initiative to migrate to a new cloud-based Salesforce CRM required a holistic, 360-degree view of all customer information.
To overcome these challenges, Cellcom deployed a Customer Data Hub, which allowed the company to connect customer data from a large number of data sources. With complete customer data integration, the CDH delivered a unified customer view (to the self-service web portal, mobile application, contact center service agents, and more) in a record 3 months.
By decoupling the customer data (residing in the K2View CDH) from its old Customer Relationship Management system, Cellcom was able to quickly and accurately migrate all the customer data to it new CRM.
Agile Customer 360 allows you to quickly connect and unify your fragmented customer data into a real-time, trusted customer view, for all Customer 360 use cases.
The Customer 360’s agility comes from a data product approach, in which each instance of the “customer” data product corresponds to a single customer – with all related data stored and managed in its own individually encrypted Micro-Database™.
When Customer 360 is based on data products, enterprises can continuously and consistently ingest customer data from multi-source systems to deliver a 360-degree dataset for any customer, at any time. Following a merger or acquisition, in which the amount of data source systems, technologies, and formats are multiplied, having the ability to easily unify and deliver customer data in real-time is invaluable.