The behavioural patterns and needs and requirements of consumers are always changing and evolving, however, the changes seen recently have brought a colossal shift in the business world. There has been a sudden shift in the way customers engage with a company and invest in its products or services. Consequently, the current business landscape is a tricky terrain to walk through.
Regrettably, a multitude of digital technologies employed today in the business world are not able to facilitate the emerging needs of customers and deliver the value they’ve been promised. On a large extent, companies need to rely on IT to help them collect information from multiple data sources and then consolidate it to garner insights and make decisions. IT departments, however, struggle to implement data connections in minutes owing to an unending queue of requests. Consequently, organisations are somehow forced to make decisions with only half of the data they can collect. That, in turn, interferes with insights delivery and decision-making process. And consequently, companies either delay or entirely fail to deliver value to customers.
Fundamentally, one single, bad decision can prove costly for companies and trigger long-term side effects, negatively impacting growth and innovation. And inaccurate or bad data is one the most common reasons why companies can make bad decisions and ultimately delay value generation. Companies that rely on traditional data integration technologies are most vulnerable.
Truth is, traditional or legacy data integration solutions require IT teams to write a lot of custom codes and execute mapping routines, which takes time and is mostly error-prone. Research indicates that it takes IT teams six to 12 weeks to integrate data and create data connections. Meanwhile, customers wait to connect with business users to receive value.
Ergo, it’s essential for companies to reimagine their legacy data integration approach. Self-service integration platforms can play an important role here.
Self-service integration solutions enable all business users to implement data connections in minutes – at speed and with minimal effort. While business users onboard and collaborate with customers data, IT can focus on high-productivity tasks. In other words, IT can drastically improve their productivity and minimise costs through self-service solutions. By empowering business users to create integrations, they are freed to take on much complex projects.
Why Do Companies Need Self-Service Integration?
Self-service integration solutions enable non-techie business users to implement data connections and add new customers – at speed and scale. Here are several reasons why businesses must leverage self-service integration solutions to deliver value:
- Accelerate Data Exchange: With technological advancements in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and security protocols, even non-technical users can comprehend and define data semantics, and then implement data connections on the basis of those data rules.
Additionally, businesses can retrieve, break down, and manage multi-dimensional, complex data and stream it in real-time to carry out modern-day business transactions. Hence, with a self-service integration solution in place, business users can process highly secure transactions between protected ecosystem and their environment without worrying about breaches – all by themselves.
- Improve Decision-Making by Democratising Data: By turning business users into citizen integrators, companies can relive their IT teams to drive data-driven operations. So, even business users can access to information they need to make decisions and take a central role in value generation. Even non-technical business users can look directly at data streams and customer entities through intuitive screens and dashboards. They can create onboarding connections in minutes or hours by pointing and clicking through easy screens. This accelerates insights delivery and ultimately decision-making.
- Empower Non-Technical Business Users to Accelerate Value: By leveraging self-service integration solutions, business users to implement customer data connections in minutes instead of months. At the same time, IT is freed to focus on more high-value tasks and innovate faster. As a result, companies can access the information they need to make informed decisions, deliver delightful CXs, and grow revenue.
Taking a self-service integration approach can empower businesses to create customer data connections, make accurate decisions, and drive value.
