Think your data can predict and prepare for next-gen customer experiences? Precisely!

Precisely has been in the data business a long time - since 1968, in fact, originally known as Syncsort. The company has been a leader in data integrity around the globe, and with more than a half century of experience in data integration, data quality, data governance, location intelligence, data enrichment, and customer engagement solutions.

Artificial intelligence is the new big thing - and with good reason; it is a strategic enabler that can help you do more with less, supporting customers, summarising documents, recommending next best actions, accelerating content creation, and so much more. Yet while 91% of businesses have ongoing investments in artificial intelligence, Gartner reports only 4% of companies actually have data that is currently AI-ready.

If that's your situation, you might think you need help expert help. Well, that's precisely so, and here's where Precisely comes in. The company rebranded under the Precisely moniker in 2020 bringing together a strategic blend of tech from Syncsort, Trillium, Pitney Bowes, Infogix, Winshuttle, and others. It employees 2,500 staff and supports more than 12,000 customers worldwide including the bulk of the Fortune 100. Locally, these customers include Sky New Zealand and Heinz Watties Australia.

Precisely EVP and GM of Engage Solutions Greg Van den Heuvel, and Precisely chief product officer Christopher Hall took time from their busy schedules to speak with iTWire and explain how data is driving next-generation customer experiences and why data quality and observability are critical for organisational growth.

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The name Precisely "plays in with our product offering," Van den Heuvel said. "We help customers produce consistent, accurate, contextually relevant data that is used to power business decisions."

"It starts with accurate data; the better the data, the better the customer experience and outcomes."

The data journey means "a lot of different things to a lot of different companies, depending on where they are," Hall said. "Their data journey moves from origination and generation, whether mainframe, automation into SAP, or something else, through to integration and replication, moving data from one system to another."

"Our customers want to collect, validate, catalogue, and govern data."

Now, so far that may sound like regular run-of-the-mill data engineering. However, Precisely takes it several steps further and deeper. Hall continued, "we help them augment their data with third-party data on risk, school zones, fire risks, social media portfolios, spatial data, routing, last mile delivery, best drive time, and a raft of other things."

Then, "we help customers monitor that. Our data observability detects if there is a change, or data drift, or any kind of gap that might impact decision making."

And, "finally, we help customers activate and engage data into customer experiences, bills, statements, interactions with chatbots, even creating data-driven videos based on clean, accurate, and precise data."

"Some customers may want to just work with us on governance, enrichment, or strategic services," he said. "If they don't know what best practices are if working with high quality data or how to transform their business, we can help them operate and operationalise."

And then, "we see a lot of people want to get their data AI-ready. It has to be precise, or it's garbage in / garbage out. If you're not using accurate data then you get bad outputs."

To give a specific example, Van den Heuvel explained how Precisely works with customers to deliver a great customer experience with billing and renewals. "When we speak about contectually relevant, we will take a feed from core banking or core insurance and take that feed and cleanse it, enrich it, and integrate it into their communication platform."

This drives the many documents and communications the customer receives; "these types of communications fuel business today. If you get it wrong you can lose a customer. It's why most CIOs list one of their top three goals as improving customer experience. It has to be highly interactive and personalised to the individual."

Further, all companies want to reduce churn, he said. "Churn is real." For any given company "5 to 20% of customers churn from their current provider. The only way to affect that is to get more relevant, interactive, and personalised communications - which is fueled by data."

"We might send out a communication," he said. "It could be paper-based, email, SMS, or so on, but since COVID it's all really about self-service. It's about the customer's experience to go in through whatever channel - web, portal, etc. - to get access to past history, make plan changes, alter payment methods, and take some sort of action."

Again, "in order to do that, the data must be relevant, and contextual to the customer."

"We have a mid-tier retail bank with 370 locations and 80 years of business," Hall said. "They had a very low adoption of digital experiences and wanted to move from 7% to 50% digital adoption over three years. Imagine the mail and print costs saved."

"We provided them with a way to consolidate all their communications whether SMS, PDF, or other, and to greet the client with something highly interactive and personal. It started with video, which analyses the data in two seconds and creates that personalised experience for the end customer."

"When they see it and hear it, it results in three times the comprehension than simply reading alone. The video view time is six minutes per video, and captures interest, with the customer comprehending exactly what the bank is trying to communicate."

This specific solution used the Engage business unit inside Precisely, and leveraging the business' RapidCX communication platform.

"We built it on top of one of the hyperscalers with backend integrations into ERPs and CRMs to get their source data, leverage our data integrity suite, mesh it with on-prem systems, manage content and rules for customers," Hall said. "It's important to understand how customers want the communications delivered, how to interact with it, and then leverage our APIs for delivery services to track the events and data behind them for regulatory governance reporting and archiving. Records are retained for five years, seven years, whatever is needed to give exact proof of what was delivered, whether email, PDF, video or something else."

"Imagine a regulator asking for all communications and customers having to query five or six or more systems. It creates confusion with regulators and takes time. RapidCX allows us to consolidate all comms into one platform and have governance."

Another example; "we have a huge multinational bank with more than 10 million accounts. It's one of the top five online bankers. Typically when a change request comes in, such as to change communications, it would take 104 days to execute that change request."

"The market drifts quickly in 104 days."

"We took them over to our Directly product. We showed them how to manage, operate, and support the platform, and we trained non-technical people to make changes. It reduced their 104 day change request time down to two days. It saved this multinational over $6.3 million per annum in change requests, and freed their IT department to focus on strategic works."

Whatever the industry, whateveer the scenario, whatever the customer need, "it really all starts with data," Hall said.

"One of the things we found is that most people's data is not ready for AI. Only 4% are ready. If you want to look at a business case or objective it's imperative to have the right data. Is it standardised, normalised, the right context? Can you make models?"

"We interviewed the C-suite," Van den Heuvel said. "91% said they had specific AI investments, but only 4% were ready to do something with it."

"Like data and customer experience using AI models, one of the big issues in CX is how to migrate all the templates, libraries, preferences, workflows and items built up over 20 years to produce things like bills customised for the individual."

"Frankly," he said, "for the longest time people sweat the asset to the tune where they develop security risks. They have legacy apps which people are no longer able to support."

Early on Precisely determinaed it could migrate a company's mass stores of data - thousands of billing templates, for example - into RapidCX within six months to a year. However, though leveraging AI internally the company has now accelerated this to only two to three days. "Typically it would take 65 days to migrate libraries, templates, and workflows. Now we can do it in an hour and a half, and then spend a couple of days doing cleanup."

While billing is a regular use case, "another request we get is for 'next best'," Van den Heuvel said. "For example, a bank producing credit cards wants us to analyse the data and inform the next best service to sell. For instance, if a customer spends in a DIY store, it might be a good time to promote home equity or a new mortgage."

"These are the kind of insights customers are asking us for."

Ultimately, Hall said, "data is lifeblood."

"We want people to trust their data and make confident business decisions. Everyone is often frustrated with their data. Precisely can help them build quality and trust in their data."

"We get them to love their data again," he said.