Planning on building a marketing campaign? Great! Apart from all the steps you have to go through in terms of working out what will make up the campaign and the message and artefacts that will be delivered as a part of the campaign, you will have to work out who you’re going to target as customers or prospects and that in itself is no easy feat to accomplish.
Your Customer Data Platform (CDP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Marketing Automation (MA) systems, likely have a lot of data in them. Not all of it will be master data, some of it will be transactional but you likely want to focus on the most up-to-date and most accurate customer lists that you have. If you don’t have a consistent way of harvesting that data and building those lists then you’re likely going to struggle despite all the systems and tools at your disposal.
For the full potential of the campaign to be harnessed, you must not only gather up the but you need to also provide ensure that the data is the most meaningful. That means that the data needs to be of the best possible quality. It is likely that you have pools of issues related to data quality in all of these systems even if you have recently implemented them or migrated to them.
Specialised systems like ERP and CRM have been around for a long time, CDPs are relative newcomers and as for MA, you could be using a variety of technologies to execute marketing automation. As these systems age, so does the data. If you have lax data controls and different data governance guidelines for different systems, standardization and duplication of the data become a challenge too. These issues evolve into large-scale and complex ones as the organization grows.
With these data silos, quick information retrieval from any touch-point of the organization is difficult. Without centralized and integrated management of the data, data fragmentation, duplication, and inaccuracy will be a commonplace occurrence. When the customer data is updated in one system but the same data is not immediately reflected across the other systems, data inconsistencies will emerge and these are felt in downstream systems fed from these sources.
Business decisions like that marketing campaign, require a data-centric approach with conclusions drawn through data analysis rather than best efforts, gut instincts and intuition. Decision-making needs secure and consistent access on-demand, to the most up-to-date information from anywhere, it is needed.
Without access to trusted consistent data, basic questions such as “Is this customer in region x or of the right age or a recent customer?” can be difficult to answer.
A lack of consistent, accurate and deduplicated customer data will paralyze the responsiveness of business decision making and potentially even lead to compliance issues
Poor quality with missing values, data inconsistency or duplicates impairs your business’s ability to make other intelligence-based decisions. Forecasting, planning, support, service, billing and logistics rely a great deal on algorithms, without the right data, the decisions that they will take or recommendations that they make will be flawed.
“A technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the uniformity, accuracy, stewardship, semantic consistency and accountability of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets.” – Gartner
At Pretectum we believe that a comprehensive strategic approach to customer master data management is essential in providing a single consistent view of the customer master to the business. We see this as possible with the Pretectum CMDM.
Reach out to us and let’s have a discussion around your business needs and expectations.