Making customer data work better for your business

In the newest installment of the Data Unlocked Podcast, Jason Davis, Simon Data’s co-founder and CEO links up with the co-founder of Actable, Matt Greitzer.

The Big Question

As always, Jason asks Matt how marketers can unlock opportunities with better data capabilities.

Matt’s thoughts on becoming data-driven

Well, there are a bunch of challenges in doing so. Some are obvious and some are not. A lot of what we find is that data, in theory, exists in organizations. But in reality, it’s really like locked away in various places, and it’s not necessarily deployed at business goals. It’s more of an esoteric exercise in a lot of cases. And there’s sort of technical reasons for that, and there are organizational reasons for that, and then there are practical reasons for that.

We’ve tried to work on a sort of organizational perspective with clients really to how you figure out how to unstick data from internal pockets within an organization. We can then get it out into an ecosystem where it can be analyzed, deployed, and enriched. And that’s often the gap. It’s sort of the theoretical desire and the theoretical understanding of what to do with data in an enterprise and then the actual practical ability to be data-driven.

There’s a way that we’re starting to see some of our customers come at it, which is by working backwards. They’ll consider first what they are trying to do with the data.

How is it actually going to create value for their enterprise? And what are the specific deployments for that? How is it going to make your customer service center more effective? And what information do they need to be responsive when somebody calls up with a problem?

If you start there, then you can work backwards and say, well, okay, well, what data do we have to surface from what systems in order to make that happen?

And at least that gives you a path. I think when you start the other way and maybe try to go top-down, it can become daunting, particularly with like large enterprises where they’ve got decades of tech debt and data debt that they’re trying to pay off. It can be hard to do that top-down. So use case-driven or what are you trying to do with the outcome approach seems to work well. And we’ve started to see a lot of our customers move towards that.