Digital transformation is no more rhetoric; it is a reality now. Though pervasive in boardroom agendas, the idea of digital transformation worries organizations of all types. One common challenge that most organizations discuss is data management capability. This insight attempts to understand the importance of data management in digital transformation and how Pimcore Platform can help improve data management capability, refine the existing operating model, and quickly expand into new digital revenue streams.
Changing Archetype of Business Operations
Businesses today need to be attuned to digital technology. The days when you could achieve desired business objectives without incorporating the latest tools and technologies of this ever-changing digital world are long gone. Without digitization, it is hard to stay ahead in today’s digital-led business ecosystem. Here is why:
1. Customer Expectations
Organizations face a pressing need to manage customer expectations as they evolve. Digitalization is an essential step in managing these changes, but it's not enough in a linear way. Organizations must have the capability and capacity for personalized service delivery that will keep up with changing demands from consumers.
There are many ways businesses can use technology to meet and exceed customer expectations. Digitization enables organizations with more efficient systems for collecting data on customers' needs from various sources, alongside personalized one-to-one conversations for increased engagement rates. It also allows a higher conversion rate because customers feel connected when they're having these meaningful interactions instead of chaos happening across fragmented platforms.
2. Digital Product Management
The physical identity of products and services cannot alone help in scaling the business. Today, products and their ecosystems are increasingly becoming more complex and difficult to manage. Operation teams have to take care of lots of things such as multiple product data sources, varied product bundles, pricing tiers, dynamic pricing, upsell/cross-sell opportunities, syndication channels, and multiple customer touchpoints. Along with that, the growing volume of products and SKUs, product upgrades, and improvements all add up to more complexity.
This has led to a shift in managing products with digital technology with greater efficiency, accuracy, and transparency. Digitalization acts as a catalyst for organizations to come up with innovative solutions to solve customers’ problems, improve operational efficiency, and deliver personalized experiences through digital channels. But, there should be coordinated effort throughout the organization, from top to bottom, to make this happen.
3. Digital Innovation
It is the age of digital Darwinism, where digital evolution is crucial; otherwise, you will become extinct. Therefore, enterprises must prepare fast to drive digital innovation. The covid pandemic is the latest example. Though it has impacted our ability to work, communicate, and thrive in an increasingly mobile world, it also spurred innovations like communications apps that offer real-time updates on health conditions around the globe.
This new reality creates challenges for traditional organizations that were not present before, such as data integration or interacting remotely from different locations around the globe via technologies. However, there are also opportunities ahead where AI can take us even further than ever imagined: towards touchless experience across every touchpoint regardless of whether customers are online.
4. Digital Transformation: The Adoption Rate
Spending on digital transformation technologies and services worldwide from 2017 to 2024, rise from 0,6 to 2,39 trillion U.S. dollars. [Statista.com]
Essential Components of Digital Transformation
Every organization has been collecting and managing its data for years. It's what drives decisions, innovation, and growth - but it can be difficult to manage without an organization-wide strategy in place that supports your efforts.
Businesses need a cohesive data management strategy. With an integrated data management approach across departments, organizations can take advantage or get ahead with what they need to execute their digital initiative successfully! In fact, data is the backbone for digital transformation because of the following factors:
1. Robust Data Management
Data is like a living, breathing entity. It needs to be nurtured and cared for in order not only to survive but also thrive! The lack of data management practice impacts how quickly we can solve problems. A robust data management capability increases the value of data and analytics along with trust, diversity, and transparency. It further helps in enabling new technologies supporting platforms, collaboration models, and ecosystems to drive digital transformation vision.
2. Consistent and Seamless Experience
Organizations often operate in isolation across touchpoints, with significant overlaps or gaps that make it difficult for customers to imbibe everything as one brand identity. This can lead to not just fragmented experiences, but outright CX problems when the same communication has discrepancies from each other across different sales channels. To achieve continuous customer experiences across multiple channels, you must adopt an agile architecture to deliver a seamless user experience and enable integration agility.
3. Automated Manual Efforts
When you have intake tasks such as ingesting new product data or fixing existing problems before it can be used effectively, it requires frequent human intervention because there isn't any automated routine available yet. This process wastes both resources and time. Automation can support your digital business in many ways. It helps speed up existing manual processes, eliminate redundant tasks, and improve operational efficiency.
4. Capability to Scale Fast
Data received and pushed from 3rd party systems can vary based on various parameters. Sometimes it can overgrow, and at times it can drop. Businesses should have systems that scale as the data grows and provide a more inexpensive approach to handling complicated data. Your business's ability to do so can result in better data literacy, faster decision-making, and achieving desired business goals.
What Does It Mean for an Organization Looking Towards Transformation?
It means they should shape their strategy around adopting robust capabilities for data management, experience management, and customer engagement. And, then it should help establish best practices across various functions such as product team, marketing & sales, and customer support team.
The unified platform approach is emerging fast, enabling organizations to drive their digital transformation initiatives and provide comprehensive capabilities in overall data management. From the holistic perspective, organizations are attracted to this option, anticipating the improved total cost of ownership due to less integration and maintenance between data quality solutions and adjacent applications. In fact, the adoption of a unified data management platform will continue to grow in the near future.
How Does Pimcore Accelerate Digital Transformation to Drive Business Growth?
1. Agility through microservices
Pimcore helps you future-proof your business with a flexible microservices-based architecture. With the help of pre-built data and experience management building blocks, your teams can easily create a custom infrastructure. Furthermore, they can agilely scale and evolve the IT-framework as needed using a low-code approach. It helps you generate revenue faster than ever before: regardless of if you have a PWA online shop or custom web interfaces and apps for your sales teams, you can quickly implement and improve any data and experience management solution.
2. Superior connectivity, fully API-driven
You can build the foundation for a customer-centric digital ecosystem to populate all current and future digital touchpoints with ease. You can innovate fast with Pimcore’s modern APIs and easy-to-use low-code development environment. You can seamlessly integrate your existing back-end system or third-party applications. Above all, you can customize, integrate and extend the platform as you need it, no matter what type of front end is running on your customers' devices.
3. Infrastructure of choice for global scalability
Pimcore is a scalable platform for both on-premises deployment and global 24/7 access via the cloud. The on-premises deployment includes hosting Pimcore on local servers behind a firewall, keeping data 100 % private. The Cloud Edition powered by Amazon AWS provides the fastest ramp-up time, and Pimcore experts take care of everything for you! Pimcore also allows direct GitHub access and Docker images for your preferred deployment on Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or other leading on-demand cloud hosting providers.
4. Save time and provide structure
Pimcore’s headless architecture enables you to decouple the customer touchpoints in the frontend from the data in the backend. It allows all types of frontends ("heads") to evolve independently without affecting the data or content. As a result, it gives you the flexibility and freedom to create and collaborate on content in a central location and provide consistent, predictable data to multiple online and offline output channels. Pimcore is highly flexible - you can use it in a monolithic, headless, or decoupled style.
5. Flexible Framework for Innovation
The Pimcore Enterprise Edition & Community Edition are development frameworks with a high degree of customizability to satisfy the requirements of the most demanding developers. They use the web's most popular, up-to-date technology stack of PHP/Symfony, MySQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, and Varnish. As a result, you can innovate faster and implement sophisticated web applications in record time.
Digital Transformation Success Story
Delightful Customer Engagement and Ample Marketing Opportunities for a leading supermarket chain
The client is a leading supermarket chain headquartered in Anaheim, California. They operate 41 high-volume stores and have a workforce of around 6000 associates. The client was facing numerous issues relating to the maintenance of customer data. This included no single trusted repository for customer information, as the data resided in different business departments and applications.
Pimcore partner carried out real-time integration with end-user touchpoints to aggregate data in one location. Master data management (MDM) was implemented to remove redundancies. Advanced technologies were incorporated for data verification and registration by integrating with third-party channels like OFAC for facial and address recognition. With the implemented solution, the company could effectively segment customers, personalize content for them and send tailored offers. Besides, MDM also helped in reducing a significant amount of time in data accumulation and cleansing. Due to improved customer experience and online presence, their grocery business experienced a very high footfall.
