As economic uncertainty continues, businesses of all sizes are looking to reduce unnecessary costs. It’s a well known fact that it costs more to recruit new customers than to retain existing ones, and, as such, large and small businesses alike need to focus on customer experience as cost-sensitive customers look for higher value alternatives. Yet with reduced budgets, how can businesses provide the best customer experience to differentiate their offerings and, in turn, thrive in the economic downturn?

While there are many sectors where the customer is king, customer experience is particularly critical in the telecommunications industry. Over time, most communications service providers (CSP) have built complex systems to manage their customer information. The result is a collection of systems comprised of both custom-built and commercial data management solutions that have contributed to large-scale data fragmentation, which is now making it difficult to access customer data. With most customer information stored in separate data “silos” (billing, order entry, applications, etc.), it has become costly and complicated to create a unified composite view of a single customer. This is problematic since understanding your customers is a cornerstone of proper customer management and essential to offering a more personalized user experience that can yield long term growth and profitability.

Many CSPs have turned to master data management (MDM) solutions to consolidate data across their back office and data center systems, but this typically excludes network applications that require real-time customer data access to enable time-sensitive services including text messaging, location-based navigation, and mobile commerce. CSPs need a better way to access their customer data to power the various services they offer while also feeding those systems used by customer service representatives for in-store, over the phone and web self-service interactions.

Although the aforementioned examples are focused on the telecommunications industry, the concepts exist with any customer data-intensive business where a good customer experience is a critical differentiator. For businesses looking to implement customer data management best practices, virtualizing the underlying data sources can be exactly the differentiator businesses and their customers need. With database virtualization, data can be unified and federated across multiple sources and protocols into one, unified data source that allows applications to access, manage and view data as a single system. This is accomplished by leaving both underlying data sources and the applications accessing them untouched.

Database virtualization not only enables easier and faster access to data, but allows businesses to extend existing and often disparate data assets by offering a unified and synchronized view of all their customer data. The ability to quickly access data predictably and in real-time results in a richer user experience where applications such as text messaging, video downloads and mobile search become a more personalized experience. This translates to the kind of experience that makes a customer perceive more value in a given set of services. On the customer service side, the ability to access a complete customer profile, in real-time, dramatically improves the customer experience and makes cross-selling and up-selling services much more productive.

To save time and money, businesses should look for data management solutions that take advantage of and support existing legacy systems instead of heading down a disruptive and costly path of “ripping and replacing” what is already there. Database virtualization can dramatically improve time-to-market for a new way to manage data that delivers higher efficiency at a significantly reduced total cost of ownership.

Lean economic times call for more efficient measures, which is why extending the capabilities of existing data assets with database virtualization can make your data infrastructure work more efficiently and improve the customer experience. And loyal customers can make a world

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