Your customer clicks “Buy Now” and feels a wave of excitement—this blue medium-sized button-up shirt is perfect for their upcoming event.
But a week later, frustration starts to creep in. There’s no delivery, no updates, and when the package finally arrives, it’s a green small-sized shirt. Now they’re stuck in a loop of trying to contact customer service to sort out the issue.
I just want the shirt I ordered, they think, as they juggle long wait times on the phone and generic responses via email. But they don’t find a solution. Determined to fix the problem, they decide to visit the brand’s physical store, shirt and receipt in hand.
Frustration mounts as the store associate explains they can’t process the return because the SKU doesn’t match what’s in their system.
At this point, the customer is disappointed, confused, and starting to lose trust. The company they once admired now feels unreliable and disorganized. Meanwhile, the brand’s marketing team, unaware of the issue, sends the customer an email with a 20% discount on the very same shirt they’ve been trying to return. It’s the final straw.
What the customer doesn’t see is the chaos behind the scenes.
How Did the Customer Journey Become Problematic?
The customer journey should be a series of interconnected moments that guide a customer from discovery to loyalty. But for many businesses, it’s anything but.
We’ve seen cases where the company’s inventory data is fragmented across multiple systems—Shopify, Amazon, eBay—and SKUs are inconsistently labeled with dashes, underscores, or even typos. These discrepancies ripple through their operations, leading to incorrect inventory counts, delayed shipping, and disjointed customer service. Then the marketing team, relying on incomplete data, ends up targeting the wrong customers with irrelevant offers.
This is how disjointed data turns what should be a seamless customer journey into a frustrating experience. And when customers lose faith in your ability to get the basics right, they’re likely to shop elsewhere.
But these aren’t just isolated problems. They’re symptoms of deeper issues within your data framework. Many companies attempt to fix these issues with patchwork solutions by manually updating databases, applying quick fixes to workflows, or relying on siloed tools to address isolated problems. While these efforts might temporarily alleviate the symptoms, they fail to address the root cause: fragmented, unreliable data.
How to Bridge the Gaps
At the heart of every seamless customer journey is reliable data. Datagence specializes in creating unified, integrated, and standardized data systems that solve the root cause of these disjointed experiences.
Here’s how we do it:
Product Cost and Price Verification
One eCommerce customer we helped had issues with incorrectly assigned costs and prices for their products which directly impact revenue streams.
For example, an item should have a cost of $12.00 and a price of $18.00. However, the cost and price were reversed, thus costing the company money.
We stepped in to act as the intermediary between the eCommerce platforms and the company’s ERP system, discovered why this had been happening and fixed the issues. Our always-on solution continuously monitors and adapts to changes, ensuring data flows smoothly across systems.
SKU Standardization and Maintenance
Inconsistent SKUs were a major hurdle for the eCommerce company mentioned above. We worked with their team to implement a standardized process for SKU creation and maintenance.
By aligning SKUs across platforms and automating error detection, we eliminated mismatches and prevented mistagged variants from disrupting their operations. With clean, consistent SKUs, their inventory reports became reliable, and customers received the products they ordered without delay.
Membership and Customer Data Validation
For companies managing memberships or loyalty programs, maintaining accurate contact information is critical.
We helped one retailer validate and enrich their customer data, ensuring that renewal notices and loyalty perks reached the right people at the right time. By deduplicating records and maintaining interconnected databases, we preserved the integrity of their customer relationships while enhancing the overall experience.
What a Unified Customer Journey Looks Like
When data is standardized, integrated, and reliable, businesses can create customer journeys that feel effortless. Imagine this:
-
- A customer purchases a product online and receives a personalized follow-up email with tailored recommendations based on their purchase history.
-
- They decide to return the item at a brick-and-mortar store, where the associate can instantly access their transaction details and process the return without hassle.
-
- Meanwhile, their loyalty points are updated in real time, reflecting both the purchase and the return, keeping them engaged in the rewards program.
These seamless interactions are possible because the data powering them is clean, connected, and continuously monitored. Customers don’t see the backend work, but they feel the difference in every interaction.
Clean Data Builds Trust
When customers see that your company knows who they are, remembers their preferences, and respects their time, they are more likely to become loyal customers.
At Datagence, we believe that a seamless customer journey is achievable for every business. By addressing the root causes of disjointed experiences, such as data inconsistencies, siloed systems, and manual processes, we help companies deliver the kind of journeys that turn first-time buyers into lifelong advocates.
Ready to create a seamless customer journey? Contact us today to learn how we can help you standardize, integrate, and unify your data for lasting success.
