Data has become a huge area of business, helping businesses to drive their intelligence, make better decisions, and formulate strategic plans for future growth. Yet, data is ultimately meaningless unless it is formatted, stored, and analysis is acted upon it. Without these steps, these random collections of numbers mean absolutely nothing to businesses or to anyone else.
One of the central ways in which data informs business practices is on the customer-facing side of their operations. In fact, the integration of data into customer processes is vital, with data-driven companies being 23 times more likely to acquire customers than those that neglect their data. This also carries over into maintaining their customers, with data-driven companies being 6 times more likely to keep their customers once they’ve obtained them.
With statistics like these, it’s no wonder that businesses are turning to methods of leveraging their data, seeking technological infrastructure which will help them manage and analyze their data on a larger scale. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at one of these storage options, data warehousing as a service, and demonstrating why it’s vital for businesses that want to engage more effectively with their customers.
Let’s get right into it.
What is Data Warehousing as a Service (DWaaS)?
Over the past few years, with a more pressing need for service solutions, whole industries have sprung up around providing services to businesses for a monthly subscription fee. The whole Software as a Service (SaaS) industry is now worth over $145.5 billion USD, demonstrating how integral these rented services have become.
In line with the success of SaaS, another form of service lending has sprung up, holding the intention of letting businesses structure and hold their data in more effective formats. This industry, known as Data Warehousing as a Service (DWaaS), has similarly seen huge growth over past years, with an average predicted 22.08% yearly growth rate from now until 2028.
DWaaS is the action of outsourcing all of the data management needs to an external business. This action includes all of the hardware that stores the data, as well as the software that allows for effective analysis to be run on the datasets stored in these warehouses.
Businesses are moving to DWaaS solutions in order to get help with data structuring, forgoing the need for on-site data storage in turn for this subscription service. Without upfront costs, managing fees, and the need to continually update your own on-site storage facilities, this cloud solution is saving businesses across America millions of dollars a year.
What are the general benefits of DWaaS?
Although turning to DWaaS has become a common practice within businesses, those that aren’t currently engaged with cloud data facilities may not be sure why exactly they have become so popular. Above all, the benefits of moving to DWaaS solutions outweigh the perks of on-site storage, making this a natural pathway of transfer for the majority of businesses that have to deal with lots of data on a daily basis.
Breaking this down further, there are commonly three reasons that DWaaS is cited as a fantastic service for businesses:
- Ease of Use – Instead of having to spend days or even weeks updating and transferring your data from one on-site location to another to ensure its efficiency, DWaaS offers a turnkey data solution. Whenever businesses want to make the switch, they simply need to buy the amount of storage that they need and then transfer their data across. This is typically done via internet transfer, meaning they quite literally don’t have to lift a finger as they watch their business data get transferred from their on-site location into this cloud database. The easy process is certainly one of the biggest pulls toward this system of working.
- Removing Responsibilities – When it comes to managing on-site storage, there are a lot of different facets that go into the process. From ensuring that the database is up to date with the latest security features to double-checking that all the data is accessible and stored in a format that appeals to analysis, data scientists will spend valuable time working to keep data in the correct conditions. Yet, DWaaS services take care of every element of this process, their cloud automation ensures that they are always up to date, never offline, and always accessible for your business. In short, it removes the amount of work needed to contain rich data sets for your business.
- Cost-Effective – On-site data storage incurs larger fees in two main ways. First of all, to have on-site storage you need to buy the physical space from which you’ll host all of the data servers. This means that your business needs to rent an office space and pay all of the associated fees for keeping that data room in the optimal conditions, as well as the fees for maintenance workers if anything were to go wrong. Additionally, you’ll have to hire data scientists to make sure your data is accessible, incurring higher fees by having to pay additional salaries. With DWaaS, you just need to pay a monthly subscription fee, saving your business huge amounts of money.
While there are more complicated benefits of DWaaS, there are the three pillars upon which this whole service stands.
If you’re looking for a recommendation of effective DWaaS solutions, we recommend reading a comparison of Snowflake vs BIgQuery, which are two large-scale data warehousing services.
How can DWaaS help impact the customer experience?
At the end of the day, data is a powerful tool within business. This especially rings true for businesses that put their data to use in innovating their customer experiences.
Let’s address three ways that the customer experience is impacted by having accessible data in cloud data warehouses. We’ll be addressing:
- Marketing teams and personalization
- Smooth transitions along the sales funnel
- Structured data breaks down silos
Let’s explain how these come into play.
Marketing Teams and Customer Personalization
One of the most effective ways that businesses can boost their customer engagement is to use their data to create data-driven marketing campaigns. In fact, this is so commonly known by marketing managers that 99% of them suggest that personalization helps advance customer relationships.
One of the best ways to ensure that content is personalized is by using customer data, feeding it to the marketing team, and helping them to inform their design and content choices. Instead of creating several different campaigns and just hoping that your customers enjoy them when you access customer data stored in a data warehouse, you’re able to more actively understand exactly what your consumers enjoy.
With this, your marketing team is able to create more personalized campaigns that directly target your audience based on their likes and interests. With this, the customers experience a higher degree of personalization, helping them to enjoy your advertising more, which boosts engagement and ensures that your business converts more often.
This strategy is a win-win for both your company and the customers who are set to enjoy your services and their experiences with your brand to a higher degree.
Smooth Transitions Along the Sales Funnel
Within a traditional product, there is often a big discrepancy between what the sales team promises about a service and the actual reality of what the customer experience team can deliver. Part of the confusion is a lack of connection between these teams, with information falling through the cracks and not getting passed on.
Yet, by having a centralized system where all your data is stored, these teams can more effectively work together when a new customer enters the sales funnel. When there is active communication across customer-facing teams, this means that the customer never has to repeat themselves or answer any questions that have already been addressed.
By using your business data in an accessible location like a data warehouse, you’re able to ensure that your team always has the information they need when addressing a customer. From there, the sales funnel is much smoother for them, helping to improve their experience with your brand.
Structured Data Breaks Down Silos
Data silos are one of the most impactful formations that can hinder the progress of your business. A data silo is a breakdown of communication between one department and enough, with inadequate pathways of passing data across teams leading to an inability to get the data that people need to do their jobs.
By moving to a DWaaS solution, all of the data that anyone in your various teams produces is instantly moved onto the cloud. With this, everyone has direct access to the data produced by various departments, without the need to ask for it. With this, data silos in your business are broken down, allowing for the free flow of data across departments, teams, and individuals.
Considering that data allows team members to make smarter decisions, basing their choices on data instead of faith, the access to as much data as possible means that all of their decisions at work will have a higher percentage chance of success. From executive teams to customer support and even sales, everyone will have a clearly defined pathway towards making the right decision.
Decisions that are made with data are 69% more effective than those made alone, further demonstrating the need for a business solution that breaks down data silos. DWaaS is that solution, helping businesses around the globe quickly and easily liberate their data for internal sharing. With this, customers will always have a more pleasant experience with businesses, seeing as the data-driven decisions will help put the customers’ needs first.
Final Thoughts
No matter which industry your business works within, it’s almost certain that you’ll have to deal with a form of a customer at some point. If you want to ensure that those interactions are a raging success, then moving to data-driven solutions is the most effective way of doing so.
Yet, due to the costs and difficulties associated with on-site storage, this system is almost always neglected by businesses, reducing the efficiency of their data and leading to data silos. When businesses move to DWaaS solutions, they’re able to instantly and easily transfer their company data to the cloud, using this platform subscription service to make sure that everyone in their company has access to the data they need to do a great job.
With greater access to data comes a more effective customer-engagement pathway, with data-driven decisions helping all of your teams to engage your customers in efficient and data-certain ways.
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