Integrate ServiceNow CSM and Oracle Customer Data Hub Using SynQ
Siva Devaki
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As companies embrace customer-centric, omni-channel strategies, many organizations continue to be met with major obstacles when it comes to integrating disparate systems, and more importantly, the data they share. Executing a comprehensive omni-channel strategy requires companies to assimilate massive amounts of data – data that up to now would be stored in multiple internal and external systems with varying data models – into a single platform.
A Customer Data Hub goes a long way in making this possible. It is a central repository of information regarding your customers. It enables enterprises to centralize information from heterogeneous systems, giving users a single view of customer definitions that can be leveraged across all functional departments and analytical systems. A Customer Data Hub allows for real-time synchronization, includes cleansing of duplicate data, and provides a single view of key customer data such as order, contract, and service history.
The data hub is a big data management model that uses a Big Data platform as the central data repository. These data hubs differ from traditional data management models because the data remains in place. In the traditional extract, transform and load (ETL) model, data is extracted from one system, transformed into the required format and then loaded to another system for analysis or other business purposes. In an enterprise customer data hub model, however, data is first loaded into the Big Data platform, and then analytics and data mining tools are applied to the data that resides in the hub. Offloading ELT processing to Big Data platform provides better integration for disparate data sources and reduces data movement and data latency.
Enterprise customer data hubs are designed to address the challenge of data that is ballooning in volume, variety and velocity.
How Oracle’s Customer Data Hub got the International House of Pancakes (IHOP) the data it needs in hurry?
Fig: Hub and spoke architecture of Oracle Customer Data Hub
When Patrick Piccininno joined IHOP Corp. as the company’s CIO, he quickly learned that the International House of Pancakes was about more than maple syrup. Demographic trends, spending patterns and customer preferences were all constant areas of research for IHOP executives.
But the company’s complex and disparate systems couldn’t tell upper management exactly which products were most favored by customers at IHOP’s 1,300 franchises. The company had five different sales system, and the information contained in them wasn’t being cleansed or synchronized.
That’s when IHOP ordered Oracle’s new Customer Data Hub.
“We wanted to find ways to try and pull information from the different sources, so we migrated to the Customer Data Hub strategy,” Piccininno said.
Customer Data Hub is a Web services-based product, launched by Oracle to help make its business management applications more compatible with other business systems. The product is designed to help companies gather information from Oracle systems and other business systems and store it in one place.
The Customer Data Hub uses Web services to talk to incompatible applications and create a single recording system for customer data, such as customer orders and service history.
Over the course of 90 days, IHOP set up its data hub, consolidating its systems and connecting all of its restaurants to a central hub in Glendale, California.
“Only … a few months ago we were having each of our restaurants dial up to the system,” Piccininno said. “Now we’ve got better knowledge of our customers, and we know how to sell more pancakes to our customers”.
Integrating your Customer Data Hub with your Customer Service Management platform
For a data hub that is comprehensive, integrating your Customer Data Hub like Oracle CDH, SAP, Salesforce with your ServiceNow Customer Service Management solution becomes not only important but necessary. Your ServiceNow Customer Service Management tool has tonnes of information that can add value to your Customer Data Hub and make it more comprehensive and holistic. After all, knowing your customers’ issues and pain-points goes a long way in serving them better.
- The integration between ServiceNow CSM and Customer Data Hub enhances the Customer Experience to provide targeted, differentiated customer service and relevant information
- It improves cross-sell and upsell opportunities with a complete picture of the existing customer relationship
- It enables you to have a customer hierarchy when you have multiple contacts from a single organization. This makes your sales and support much more effective as your teams always know who is the right person for them to contact for any issue
- It helps in new product initiatives and a lot more
Integrating ServiceNow CSM with your Customer Data Hub can easily be achieved by using SynQ, a platform that integrates ServiceNow with any on premise or cloud-based application. Its wizard-based point and click interface intuitively guides you through the various steps of the cloud integration process and allows both batch and real time integration. Since SynQ is based on Informatica Cloud, it has the following advantages:
Publish/subscribe hub approach
Modern architecture abstracts out complexity and shortens the time to add or update data workflows
Big data and traditional systems in sync
Seamless addition of automated data processing and storage on Hadoop to your existing data infrastructure
Hybrid cloud orchestration
Unified management of hybrid workflows speeds data integration across SaaS apps, cloud analytics, and on-premises systems
Centralized data management
Visibility, monitoring, and alerts across all data pipelines, regardless of data source
Wizards and intuitive user interface
Easy to use self-service tools facilitate rapid development, increased productivity, and greater team collaboration
Centralized data cleansing and security
Informatica Data Quality and Masking can be used together with the hub to increase the level of trust in your data
Integrate ServiceNow CSM with your Customer Data Hub using SynQ to reap the benefits of improved customer experience and better ROI.