How To Build A Scalable Customer Intelligence Solution That Drives ROI

The future of business is not only digital, it’s in the cloud. Ensuring you have a Customer Intelligence (CI) platform modernized for the digital age is a piece of the puzzle that can be one of the hardest to put together for organizations in the process of implementing a CI solution. In a study of four hundred and fifty heads of digital transformation, nearly eighty percent said they were at risk of being left behind by the digital transformation. While fifty-four percent of those same individuals felt as if their companies would go out of business or be absorbed by a competitor within four years, without a successful digital transformation. In our recent e-Book, 3 Part Framework for a Successful Customer Data Management Strategy,  the three steps to becoming a Customer Intelligence-driven Business are defined:

• Strategy - Design the strategy that gets the right people engaged with the right processes.
• Speed- Build a solution to pragmatically realize that strategy, quickly.
• Scale - Modernize your platform for scalable, agile operation in the cloud.

In our latest blogs we covered the importance of strategy and speed. In this blog, we will review the final step, scale.

Moving to the Cloud

Moving to a modern cloud architecture can alleviate many of the concerns that heads of digital transformation are facing. ROI on doing so can be seen in a variety of ways including:

• Reduced hardware: There’s no physical space or hardware to maintain.
• Reduced overhead: Reduced managed support requires no or few internal IT resources.
• Future-proof capacity: Scaling is instantaneous and requires no admin expense.
• Lower overall total cost of ownership: Cloud services minimize IT administrative costs and reduce capital and operational costs associated with maintaining on-premises or hosted databases.

Because there are no physical appliances, servers, or facilities to maintain in the cloud, IT has less on its to-do list. The cloud gives them space to think — and spend time on higher-value tasks for the company.

A fully-managed cloud solution also requires near-zero administration for patching or upgrading. All this minimizes IT administrative costs and reduces capital and operational costs associated with maintaining on-premises or hosted databases.

By seamlessly migrating data to the Microsoft Azure cloud, you remove the need to re-architect apps. Working in Microsoft Azure, your developers can build data-driven applications and websites in the programming language of their choice, without needing to manage infrastructure. This frees them to ensure apps are running most efficiently with a software as a service (SaaS) forward mindset. You’ll also find you can move faster, deliver more value, and meet fast-changing needs more effectively than those companies constrained by rigid policies and processes.

CCG’s Take

CCG CI takes all these benefits to the next level, helping you create a modern engine that can improve performance in every aspect of your business — and not just any business: retail specifically. Microsoft’s Gartner-leading cloud technologies offer a flexible platform developed for the unique analytics needs of retailers. In addition, Azure Data Warehouse is at the center of CI’s hub, and Power BI provides front-end reporting supported by monthly releases for continuous product advancement. So, you’re using familiar tools in a souped-up context for faster, smarter business decisions. And when that drives growth, CI is built to scale with your business. And unlike other enterprise data warehouse systems that can take years to implement, you can be up and running with CI in just 13 weeks.

Wrapping it Up

To build a rich vein of Custom Intelligence (and the competencies in your organization to run it) following the foundational three step roadmap framework laid out in this blog series and our eBook The Data Treasure is in Your Own Backyard  can be instrumental in the success of the solution post implementation. In organizations that follow the model we’ve described, we’ve seen as much as a 150% ROI in the first year. To discover more about implementing a CI solution read the full eBook by clicking here or get in touch with one of our customer intelligence and insights experts.