Impact Of Having Siloed Product Data On Your Business
Modern businesses mostly depend upon their product data to gain a competitive edge over their competitors in today’s evolving marketplace. Product data play a key role for businesses to conduct proper analysis and to create a proper strategy for achieving revenue goals.
Data is the main aspect for businesses to make the best move for business success. Without having good and accurate data, decision-making becomes impossible for a business in today’s data-driven world. However, many enterprises, even small businesses, suffer a lot due to data silos on their product information.
This post elaborates how siloed product data creates a negative impact on the business? And how much does it cost for an eCommerce business?
What is Siloed Product Data?
Siloed Product Data is a kind of raw data also referred to as bad data. Generally, these kinds of data are accessed and controlled only by a specific department or unit. The other departments of a business or an organization to access siloed product information are restricted.
Often businesses and organizations suffer due to this siloed product data while collaborating or sharing the product data between multiple departments. Apart from creating a negative impact on data quality, siloed data acts as a barrier for business leaders to have a holistic view of their company’s product data. Overall, siloed product data creates a lack of data transparency and also causes a negative impact on data efficiency.
How Siloed Product Data Occurs in Business?
Every organization makes some mistakes internally, but If they start to consider the siloed product data as a small mistake and ignore it, then they are about to face big consequences in the future.
Here are the two vital reasons that caused siloed product data among internal departments of an organization.
Improper Business Structure
When an organization doesn’t have an improper hierarchical structure, internal departments’ fail or never understand how other departments going to benefit from the product data produced by them.
Poor Tech Stack
When organizations fail to have a proper tech stack for handling business processes and are not able to share or distribute product data/information among the other departments on time.
Apart from those, there may be several other reasons for the appearance of Siloed Product data in an organization like data duplications, data with missing fields, and so on. Let’s brief those reasons in detail.
Poor IT Strategy
Companies have poor IT strategies like a decentralized location for storing product data, allowing departments to store their content in different locations. This often leads to poor database management and poor interconnection between departments. Owing to that, data silos may happen and it may lead to siloed data as time goes on.
Poor Management
Poor management not only happens among big organizations even small companies can suffer because of the poor management allowing departments to store their product data on multiple locations and allowing them to manage as separate entities instead of on a centralized location.
Corporate Culture & Principles
There may be chances of occurrence of silos data due to corporate culture & principles. Statistics show corporate or companies not having uniform business goals and principles of data management among their different departments & units will lead to the formation of silos data.
Business Growth & Acquisitions
Based on the reports, growing companies are more likely to suffer due to data silos. When a company expands its business operation several issues regarding business operation need to be quickly addressed and additional business units may be required for smooth operation. Both situations will lead a company to create silos data.
Do you want to discuss the challenges and losses that occurred with your business because of siloed product data in detail?
How Siloed Product Data Affects Ecommerce Business?
The statistical data shows that the market value of the businesses involved in commercial activity in today’s evolving market is going to be more than $27 trillion by the end of 2022. However, if you are struggling to get rid of the siloed data, then your business won’t be part of this whopping global business market value.
Siloed data causes a serious impact on the internal departments of an organization and it leads to a negative customer experience. Once your business starts producing a negative customer experience, it will lead to your business’s downfall.
Impact of Siloed Product Data On Customers
For every business having a good customer experience is the key to its success. It doesn’t matter whether businesses sell their products either online or offline, having good product data or information is essential to attract consumers.
Good product data will always yield a better customer experience and drive product sales to new heights. In addition, it reduces product return and customer car abandoning activities dramatically. Having good and accurate product data will increase the product purchasing interest among the potential buyers.
The statistical report released by the national retail federation causes worry among retailers of the United States. In the United States alone more than $400 billion is lost every year in the United States alone due to poor product data. Also, businesses involved in eCommerce activities are facing a lot of product returns from their buyers. Next to the product return issue, the eCommerce business suffers around 70% of cart abandonment from customers at the last minute of their purchase.
Following product return and cart abandonment issues, the next big issues companies with poor or siloed product data will lose brand reputation and loyalty among potential consumers. Customer retention and finding new customers will become hard for companies with siloed data.
In addition to those, here are the lists of a few more issues raised by siloed data that will cause barriers to business success.
Limited Data View
Data with Silos prevents businesses to access relevant data and share them among departments. Without viewing the full-fledged enterprise-wide view of data, it would be hard for any business to spot the inefficiencies affecting business growth.
Affects Data Integrity
Companies having issues due to Siloed data often has their product data stored in multiple locations. This leads to a situation where various departments of a company suffer from inconsistencies. Data integrity plays a key role in saving a lot of time among departments while sharing data. Having data stored in multiple locations will affect data integrity.
Leads to Resource Wastage
Having a decentralized database/location for storing product data will cause a company to utilize more resources for storing data and to streamline the data. Companies having more workforce experience significant difficulties due to resource wastage while storing and accessing personal or professional details of the employees.
Discourage Collaborative Work
Businesses involved in the data-driven process often look to embrace collaboration between departments as a powerful tool for achieving business goals and reaching new heights. Data sharing plays a key role in driving collaborative work among departments, however, with Siloed product data collaboration among departments becomes hard due to the inefficiency of data sharing.
Do you want to create better customer experiences by addressing the siloed product data channels effectively through the right digital platform implementation?
How Much It Cost To Business Because of Siloed Product Data?
Well, predicting the exact cost that a business suffers due to siloed product data is hypothetical. Because one can’t find the exact numbers in terms of financial loss, it will differ depending upon the business value and how much it depends on the data-driven approach for its success.
This section elaborates how much value a business and its team suffer due to siloed product data along with the loss of precious time. Well, here are the few questions that every business leader needs to answer for finding the exact business value that is caused due to siloed product data.
- Just imagine how much a business will lose if its employees haven’t carried their work for an hour.
- Predict how much loss happens to a business if it fails to achieve its monthly goals on completing projects.
- Imagine how much it would cost a business if data theft happens low & slow daily.
By finding the exact answers to the above-listed questionnaires, businesses can find the losses that occurred due to siloed product data and be aware of the importance of fixing those data silos problems as soon as possible.
No doubt siloed data will play a major role in business inefficiency, fixing inefficiencies is essential for all businesses to experience growth and increase ROI.
How to Overcome Siloed Product Data Problem?
So far, this article illustrates how Siloed product data acts as a big blocker for making a vital decision for business growth. This section will brief how you should react wisely to get rid of the issues and the siloed product data problem from your business.
Here are the lists of the options you should try to safeguard your business from siloed product data.
1. Use Software for Data Integration
Managing product data stored in multiple locations would be a tedious task for any business. So, introducing standard integrating software becomes essential for effective handling of product data along with removing all those data silos threats. Meanwhile, businesses using cloud-based applications can prefer iPaaS (Integrated Platforms as a Service) platform for gaining outstanding solutions for data integration.
Having software for integrating product data across multiple systems will help businesses to deliver high-quality data and help customers to get a clear picture of the product. Also, automated data update features of data integration software will help businesses to deliver current and accurate data always.
2. Choosing Unified Solution for Data Management
Having a platform for managing all your business and product data delivers significant benefits to your business growth. Using a data management platform will cover almost every business process along with providing all kinds of assistance to the sales, marketing, and customer support team to do their work without any hassles.
Besides, a data management platform helps to handle different types of data wisely and offers seamless communication between teams/departments of a business. Once business leaders successfully find an easy way to collaborate with teams/departments of their business, almost every problem caused by siloed product data will be eliminated.
3. Use Application Having Native Integrations
Companies can seek business applications for creating in-app integration or native integrations among their systems. This can be done either by using 3rd party software or by using open-source API. It may be a time-consuming effort, but it delivers handsome results to enterprises on eliminating the siloed product data problems.
Using applications for gaining native integrations between systems will allow business leaders to create custom-tailored solutions for effective connectivity of their data with their applications like CRM or other marketing tools.
4. Development More Collaborative On Your Company Culture
Modern businesses require more innovative ideas to overcome modern problems. The modern business leader needs to create and organize a culture that embraces collaboration among departments.
Business culture should have a specific code that must encourage employees to be more collaborative and share data or information with other employees who are not even on their team. By doing so, it will boost data sharing between departments easily and encourage employees to work for a single business goal with collaboration.
5. Resolving All Outdated Data
Well, there would be no words to describe how it could be daunting for business leaders to witness that outdated data year after year while analyzing data for making a decision having a current and accurate data is essential when it comes to better data management and taking the perfect move for business goal.
Once you started to remove those silos data from your database and integrate using a very good integration app, you would witness the benefits immediately. There is nothing like having high-quality data by removing all outdated data and enriching those data through applications.
Do you want to get better insights into the solution that helps you to address the siloed product data challenges effectively?
Conclusion
If you want to run the business without any hassles by eliminating all those threats caused by siloed product data, then you must start thinking about implementing perfect data management software.
Having good data management software will improve business operation and reduce all those risk factors by about 60%. Introducing a data management solution with centralized product content offered by Product Information Management (PIM) will improve your data quality and business workflow.
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