Elevating customer experiences in AI era
THE revolution of Generative AI (GenAI) is here. GenAI has taken the world by storm with the release of ChatGPT in 2022 and as we enter 2024, many businesses are prioritizing GenAI to stay competitive and avoid falling behind.
According to a study, “CDO Insights 2024: Charting a Course to AI Readiness,” nearly half (45 percent) of data leaders have reported they have already implemented GenAI, with an additional 54 percent who anticipate they intend to implement the technology into their business operations.
While GenAI can help companies and workers gain competitive advantage and improve productivity, attention needs to be paid to data on hand that could make or break the AI models that companies have built. The key is to leverage high-quality, trusted data to develop actionable insights about customers and engage with them in more meaningful ways to drive growth and profitability, while increasing customer satisfaction and retention.
As companies strive to thrive in competitive markets, customer experience has emerged as a critical differentiator. At the same time, as AI permeates across business functions, organizations are inundated with vast amounts of data from various sources. Harnessing the full power of AI to derive meaningful insights, necessitates the prioritization of how to manage an organization’s master data to reach their most crucial business objectives.
With the influx of data from diverse applications and channels, the risk of leaving data in silos could only hinder the efficiency of AI development and leave significant room for human error. This can cause many problems: low-quality or inappropriate recommendations for customers, failed or slowed processes and inaccurate forecasts that send supply chains into chaos.
The ability to implement a data management solution with an AI-powered engine with metadata intelligence allows organizations to not only discover and catalog sources of master data and domain types, but also map how master data moves (or should move) between sources and applications across the organization. The result is that businesses will be able to deliver personalized and seamless customer experiences by providing a holistic view of rationalized customer data across channels and touchpoints.
In the AI era, where hyper-personalization is a key competitive differentiator, managing master data enables businesses to leverage AI algorithms that analyze customer data, predict customer needs and deliver targeted offerings and recommendations, thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Take for example the UnionBank of the Philippines, which has been at the forefront of embracing technological innovations for digital transformation. The bank has adopted an AI-powered data management platform with master data management capabilities to build and share an enterprise-wide 360-degree view of customers. This robust platform solution provides reliable, near real-time information that is crucial for Know-Your-Customer (KYC) initiatives, fast customer onboarding, advanced analytics and regulatory reporting based on trusted, consistent data.
By consolidating and enriching customer master data, master data management empowers businesses to gain deeper insights into customer behaviors, preferences and interactions. When companies deploy AI at enterprise scale, they need to ensure that they are operating on the most current and high-quality data, which can be realized through master data management.
As a matter of fact, master data management and GenAI are perfect partners, as master data management offers data integrity and quality for AI to generate outputs for enterprise consumption.
In this increasingly data-driven world, companies need to see data management as a more strategic function that supports their organization’s long-term business and digital transformation strategy.
Organizations will need to shift their focus to empowering business outcomes and link the use of master data management to business and digital metrics such as improvement in customer satisfaction, reduced customer churn, increased in cross and up-sell, reduced time to market and supporting product coverage on digital channels through increased data completeness, to name a few examples.
As technology continues to evolve, AI will undoubtedly play an increasingly central role in shaping the future of customer experience, enabling businesses to forge stronger connections with customers and drive sustainable growth. As more and more companies are jumping on the AI bandwagon, what sets a business apart is its data. And there is no AI benefit without holistic, trusted, governed data.
Organizations will need metadata-driven AI to improve data management, which is the mission-critical foundation of GenAI. Data is your organization’s most critical asset you will use to feed your AI and create differentiated experiences for your customer.
Steven Seah is the managing director for Asean, India and Korea for Informatica, an American software development company focusing on core products that include enterprise cloud data management and data integration.