Why Happy Data Equals Happy Customers: An Interview with UltimoSoft CEO

Blog: The Tibco Blog

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Engagement and Delight must be Ongoing

Everyone wants happy customers because they buy more of your offerings and advise others to do the same. Happy customers are less costly to support than unhappy ones. And you don’t need to find their replacements, unlike unhappy ones.

Making your customers happy and keeping them that way is an ongoing interaction that spans three critical stages:

Make them happy to begin with: Customers seek solutions to their problems. This requires you to provide offerings that meet their needs at a price that provides a sufficient margin between its value and your cost. Your efficiency matters.
Make them even happier: You can expand your revenues with your customers in new and additional ways through good service and additional offerings. Knowing your customers, what they already have, what they like, and how they want to engage lets you provide data-driven, personalized offers that are sure to delight.
Get them back to happy: Customer happiness can be fleeting. One bad experience can put your relationship at risk. So while it’s best to avoid issues in the first place, resolving issues quickly and well helps retain your customers in the long term.

Data is the Key to Customer Happiness

Across these stages, you face common business challenges:

How to optimize the processes that onboard and support customers?
How to gather what you need to know about them to engage personally and professionally?
How to measure service levels to ensure you resolve issues quickly and well?

All three questions have the same answer: data!

Realizing this universal data formula requires a holistic customer data platform, powered by advanced data management tools such as TIBCO EBX^TM Software and TIBCO Data Virtualization. And to implement the platform requires a seasoned system integrator such as long-time TIBCO partner, UltimoSoft.

To better understand how UltimoSoft helps organizations transition to next-generation customer data platforms, I spoke with UltimoSoft CEO and founder, Dr. Subhash Pasumarthy.

Subhash, let’s start with a high-level overview of your company.

“UltimoSoft is an enterprise application services provider that helps organizations efficiently design and deploy IT solutions. From strategy, architecture, and design to system integration, we work with clients to identify and realize opportunities to increase their return on investment, improve productivity, and enhance their relationships. I founded the firm in 2003, and today we have more than 350 employees worldwide.”

Why do your clients decide to upgrade their customer data platform? What are they trying to achieve?

“Like every enterprise today, our clients know that data is critical to everything they do with their customers. So, they want to upgrade their customer data platform so they could do everything better. Here are a few of the typical business objectives:

Revenue growth: To develop new business, use customer data as a competitive advantage and differentiator.
Business insight: Facilitate better strategic and operational business decision-making by providing governed, documented, and easy access to current and historical customer data.
Cost reduction: Reduce technology costs by effectively managing large volumes of customer data.
Operational improvement: Use data to improve performance and streamline business processes, especially those processes that interact with customers.
Data security: Ensure that customer data is stored and maintained securely, protected properly, and only accessible to appropriate parties.
Compliance: Use data and analytics to demonstrate contractual, regulatory, and internal audit compliance.”

That is a big list. What were the keys to success?

“Yes, the objectives and impacts are significant. To succeed at this scale, our approach to customer data platform implementations has three parts: the right products, team, and program.”

Let’s start with the right products.

“The right products, for example, TIBCO EBX and TIBCO Data Virtualization are key. EBX is often the right product because it is a multiparty master data management system, which can support various customer types, as well as vendors, staff, products, locations, and more. TIBCO Data Virtualization is often the right product because it addresses the need for governed access to all the distributed data systems that form the organization’s customer operations backbone. The combination allows us to quickly build the 360-degree views of customer data required to drive positive outcomes.”

Tell me about the right team.

“Let me first acknowledge the important role played by the client’s internal team, including their business analysts, data engineers, data stewards, and more. These people work closely with my UltimoSoft team members to move the implementation ahead. We use a blended onshore/offshore approach that delivers not only the right architects, consultants, and developers at the right time, but also the right price. When appropriate, we also team with other TIBCO partners, such as the Connected Data Group, to leverage some of their expertise as well. Everyone plays an essential role.”

Yes, everyone has a role. But how do they know what it was?

“At UltimoSoft, we have deep experience in leading large-scale data infrastructure projects. Our lessons learned and best practices—the right program, so to speak—have been honed over many years. These prove an especially important element in successful data platform implementations.”

Realizing this universal data formula requires a holistic data platform, powered by TIBCO EBX and TIBCO Data Virtualization, and implementing the platform requires a seasoned system integrator such as UltimoSoft.
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Your ability to help your clients use data to make their customers happy is impressive. If other organizations wanted to talk with UltimoSoft about their own customer data opportunities and challenges, how can they engage with your firm?

“I would enjoy speaking with your blog readers about their data opportunities, challenges, and how UltimoSoft might help. Just reach out via LinkedIn. I look forward to the conversations.”

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