Data replication means sharing information between different systems or parts of your business using data replication software. As a result, you get consistent, trustworthy data across your business. This is vital: your customers won’t understand if you give them inaccurate information because you haven’t made sure that all your teams are working from the same data.
This all sounds obvious. You need the data you use to make daily business decisions, interact with customers and plan for future growth to be trustworthy.
The reality, especially as businesses grow, is that data becomes fragmented and it can be really difficult to see where and how to unify and simplify it.
Anyone running a business should know about and plan for data replication and integration. It’s especially important if you’re running a multi-site business, or thinking of expanding.
Still not sure why it’s so important? Here are five ways data replication can help your business.
1) Data replication improves customer relationships
Customer relationship management starts, naturally, with your CRM. But it doesn’t end with it. Your sales and customer service people are the ones at the coalface of customer interaction, and the main users of your CRM. But people across your business also constantly collect data about your customers.
Data replication means that you can pull up all the data you hold about a single customer within seconds, including their interactions with your sales team, their personal information, credit history, order history, and complaints history.
Seeing all this data together means you can respond quickly and accurately to questions and deal proactively with outstanding problems. You can develop trust by demonstrating that you care enough about your customers to know who they are and what they need.
Could you achieve the same by manually copying data between systems, as many businesses try to do? Not really. There’s a huge risk of errors being made in the copying process, and even if you ignore that risk, there’s no way to make manual copying work in real-time. Data replication means accurate, real-time data, all the time.
2) Data replication means better decision making
Data informs decision-making. When you develop a new marketing campaign or carry out a business review, for example, those are data-driven processes. If the data you’re using to make decisions isn’t accurate, your decisions can’t be meaningful.
Businesses are driven by innovation, and innovation is driven by the ability to review and analyze data. While it’s possible to have lots of fantastic, creative ideas for a new marketing campaign without looking at a single piece of data, those ideas are meaningless if you don’t have data to support them.
How does data replication help? It means that when you come up with a new idea or up against a business crunch point, you can choose what to do next in the knowledge that the data you’re using to help you is accurate.
3) Data replication means accurate systems
As well as gathering data about customers, you hold a huge amount of data about your products and services. As you grow, these products can become more complex, pricing structures can change and there’s ever-increasing potential for confusion.
Confusion can be seriously damaging to customer relationships and growth. Without access to accurate data across your business, staff might find themselves telling the same customer different things on different days.
With data replication, you can make absolutely certain that when you give a customer a price or other information about a product, it’ll be accurate.
4) Data replication means better marketing and more sales opportunities
Data integration makes it easy to find and follow up on sales opportunities. It facilitates automation brilliantly, as you can use your accurate, real-time data to set up and analyze marketing automation.
It also means you can make the most of non-automated opportunities. You can see all your data from your website, sales calls, social media, ordering system and anywhere else you interact with customers in one place, any time you need it. That means being able to anticipate customer demand, measure ROI easily and personalize interactions. Pretty much anything you want to do in marketing is helped by data replication because marketing relies so heavily on good data.
5) Data replication means security and reliability
This is particularly important for businesses operating across more than one site but can be an issue for any business. The more places you store your data, the more vulnerable to you are to hackers or hardware failures.
Protect your business by using data replication. Data replication means that all your data is stored in one place, in the cloud. You don’t need to rely on local hardware which can and does go wrong.