What Is Customer Data Integration?
To remain competitive in increasingly crowded marketplaces, businesses must understand their customers’ needs and interests. One way of achieving this is by collecting data on their customers.
While there’s a wealth of data available, the challenge marketers and data teams face is transforming that data into something they can use. Customer data integration (CDI) involves combining and organizing customer data from multiple data sources to create a single data source. It’s a breakthrough for organizations drowning in data.
This practice enhances the picture of your customers and prospects so you can better serve them. For example, your customer service teams, salespeople, and procurement managers may all need access to data from your CRM tool, website activity, and online store. CDI streamlines the process of sharing that data.
CDI also allows you to build rich digital experiences using customer data from multiple sources.
Types of customer data integration
Before you begin, it’s essential to consider which type of customer data integration will work best for the data in question. The three main types of data integration include:
- Consolidation: This is the most common type of data integration. It involves taking data from multiple sources, unifying/consolidating it, and storing it in one central location.
- Propagation: You can think of propagation as automating the duplication of data. It involves taking data from a source and making one or more copies of it. For example, you might use it to share data between a marketing platform and a CRM tool.
- Federation: On the surface, federation looks similar to consolidation, as applications request data from a central point. However, with federation, the data isn’t consolidated. It’s a form of virtualization where the data is stored in multiple locations and the federating application makes it available when the user requests it.
Each technique has benefits and downsides in terms of performance, data availability, and reliability. Consider your approach carefully before choosing a method.
Why is customer data integration important?
If you’re new to data-driven decision-making and experience-building, you may be wondering if it’s worthwhile to use customer data integration. Do you need to use it as part of your data governance strategy? For all but the smallest of businesses, CDI can make analyzing customer data and using it to build differentiated experiences much easier.
With CDI, you can pull data from multiple sources and access it from one central point, giving you a smoother, faster, and less error-prone experience. You’ll get better visibility into customer behavior thanks to having instant access to information from multiple datasets.
It simplifies managing privacy and data protection, and you’ll be able to engage in better-targeted marketing. CDI gives you access to the data you need—whenever you need it.
How WordPress VIP can assist you
Our WordPress VIP API Mesh powered by TakeShape helps you integrate data from multiple sources, reducing the burden on your team and enabling you to build better user experiences. API Mesh can retrieve data from multiple systems in a single GraphQL query, unifying your data so you can build the features you need quickly and easily.
We offer numerous pre-built connectors for popular APIs. If your existing systems aren’t supported, you can build your own while taking advantage of our other tools for API acceleration, indexing, and caching. We provide you with all the tools you need to offer a smooth, enjoyable, and useful user experience while ensuring optimal performance for your site. If you’d like to know more about how developers use the WordPress VIP Platform and services to accelerate their CDI, contact us today to request a demo.