A primary driving force in today’s retail marketplace is customer experience. Recent Salesforce research concluded, “80% of customers say the experience a company provides is as important as its products and services.” To say that customer experience is equal to the value of product assortment is nothing new for brick and mortar retail, but how do we provide the same level of service in the digital age? The answer is compelling customer experiences at every touchpoint.
Customers make buying decisions based on trust and timeliness. Attracting the modern digital customer requires strategic engagement, giving them the right information at the right time, through the right channel. But with more channels than ever before and more business teams and systems involved than at any point in history, businesses must consider how to deliver consistency and completeness to the customer experience.
The answer to this obstacle is Multidomain Master Data Management (Multidomain MDM) and integration. Today’s leading retailers live and breathe digital centered around two primary pillars of data: product information and customer data. At the nexus of these two data pillars is the engagement everyone desires.
The typical retail transaction will cross 39 disparate systems. Those with the fastest times across their infrastructure win. How do they win? By responding the quickest to customer demand, and by accurately fulfilling orders ahead of expectations. This builds brand loyalty and further engagement.
Digital transformation is all about streamlining the time it takes to bring new products to market and getting them to customers. By combining the power of the Stibo Systems’ MDM platform – with a built-in Product Information Management solution, as well as a built-in Customer Master Data Management solution – with the integration capabilities of MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform and Exchange with thousands of connectors to leading enterprise systems, there is finally a stack that provides out-of-the-box digital transformation. This digital transformation, centered on customer experience, is transforming the retail landscape.
Responding at the speed of business
One of the biggest challenges facing digital retailers is the constantly changing data requirements for various marketing platforms, commerce engines, and customer engagement channels. For every new attribute or data type that is required, systems must be reconfigured, data structures must adapt, and integrations must change. These changes happen frequently and have short deadlines, putting enormous strains on the IT teams managing them.
So how can businesses move in sync with the speed of today’s customers and adapt current enterprise architectures to support that pace? The answer is simple and powerful — businesses need platforms that can manage data and integration through highly efficient configurations instead of complex software development operations.
Enter: Stibo’s MDM platform and Anypoint Platform.
With the Stibo MDM platform, a trained business user can add attributes and alternate hierarchies, even manage auto-classification rules so that the data relationships to these new hierarchies are self-managing. That same user can then use a visual workflow editor to configure their business process, and then use the WYSIWYG visual experience manager to lay out the screens that operate on that business process. They then have access to KPIs and reporting built into that same platform, all without writing a single line of code. What, then, of integrations?
By partnering with MuleSoft, enterprises’ integration fabrics are as adaptable as their data management. The integration manager is now working in a visual studio experience to connect data across systems, and changes that once required weeks of specification, development, testing, and deployment, can now be accomplished in a single day.
Crossing the boundaries of existing systems
The value of Multidomain MDM resides in the ability to connect data from disparate systems into a single data volume for seamless business process orchestration across disciplines. The challenge to do this quickly is always the complexity and number of integrations. These intertwined concerns underpin the partnership between Stibo Systems and MuleSoft.
Stibo Systems allows you to manage your product information and your customer data, as well as locations, suppliers, materials, digital assets, and other domains in a single system. Real business processes like order fulfillment require data from all of these domains. Doing so in a way that not only is more powerful than existing approaches, but easier to manage, has helped Stibo Systems’ customers drastically reduce the time it takes to onboard new products and suppliers from weeks to hours.
By leveraging a platform-based architecture, you increase visibility and agility in your business. You respond to the market with greater speed, and you build better relationships with your customers. At the end of the day, this partnership is about helping our customers do more together than they could do before. We are excited for the results that our customers can achieve by leveraging both Mulesoft and Stibo Systems to drive down complexity and reduce the cost and effort required to beat their competitors in the race for customer satisfaction.
To see how retailers are already leveraging Anypoint Platform and Stibo Systems’ MDM platform to gain an average of a 6% increase in profitability and a 6x increase in customer retention, watch our on-demand joint webinar, Creating compelling customer experiences through MDM with Stibo Systems.
