Customer master data (CMDM) is imperative to running your business well. Bad data quality, despite being a common problem, is not an excuse for poor master data management. Your customers should be central in your strategy for data quality and customer MDM.
Using bad master data negatively impacts how customers view your business and how they buy from you. New technologies mean outdated processes, which means bad-quality data. Defining who owns the data and what role they play in improving it will help lock down the issue
Customer master data (MDM) is imperative to running your business well.
The term “customer master data” refers to a single, unified set of all information concerning your customers, including names and contact information (email addresses and phone numbers), demographics (age range and gender), billing information (credit card numbers and expiration dates), preferences or purchasing history (product details they purchased previously).
Customer master data is important because it allows you to do business with your customers easily. You can use this data to personalize their experience as they interact with your brand. Without it, getting started in sales would be difficult—each interaction would involve manually inputting new customer information into each system that interacts with them (e-commerce sites such as Shopify or Magento; customer data management platforms like Pretectum CMDM). This process would result in expensive errors over time due to human error or incomplete records when some systems have outdated customer records while others have more recent versions of them.
Bad data quality, despite being a common problem, is not an excuse for poor master data management.
Data quality is a common problem, but it’s not an excuse for poor master data management. Data quality is important to your business, your customers, and your employees. You can’t afford to let bad data quality get in the way of delivering better customer experiences—or even worse, put your company at risk by exposing sensitive information about customers who have entrusted you with their personal information.
- In this article we’ll look at what makes up good and bad master data management practices and some ways you can implement better MDM policies that will keep you ahead of the curve when it comes to data quality issues.*
Your customers should be central in your strategy for data quality and customer MDM.
Your customers should really be central to your strategy for data quality and customer MDM. They are the reason you exist and make money, so it makes sense that they should also be a primary focus in terms of ensuring clean and accurate data.
After all, they are your friends, family members, and clients—they impact every facet of your daily life. They deserve only the best treatment from you when it comes to their personal details being used by others as well as yourself.
Using bad master data negatively impacts how customers view your business and how they buy from you.
Customer trust is the most important thing in business. Your customers will feel like you are being lied to, treated unfairly, manipulated, and taken advantage of if your customer master data is inaccurate.
This leads to a damaged reputation for your business—and when you factor in the cost of acquiring new customers and building up their trust again as well as any lost revenue from transactions not taking place because of bad master data…you can see that this problem has a huge impact on your business’s bottom line!
New technologies mean outdated processes, which means bad-quality data.
- New technologies make it easier to collect data, but harder to keep it clean.
- Old ways of doing things don’t work anymore.
Defining who owns the data and what role they play in improving it will help lock down the issue.
The first step in developing a solution is defining who owns the data and what role they play in improving it. If you don’t know, then your solution won’t be accurate. For example, if you have 100 customers, with 50% being females and 50% being males, but you only ask questions about gender when submitting feedback, it’s possible that your survey results will not reflect that fact.
If this sounds confusing or like something you don’t want to deal with at work (or anytime), let me put things in perspective: You need to define who owns the customer master data before moving forward with any customer-related strategy or initiative because otherwise, nobody will trust the data coming out of it!
The best way I’ve found for helping customers understand why they should care about customer master data is by giving them examples of how their business could benefit from improved customer intelligence (and showing them how much more money they would make).
Bad customer MDM is like Krampus – you don’t want it coming into your home this holiday season.
Krampus is a mythical creature that punishes bad children. Krampus does not look like Santa Claus, and Santa Claus is a good guy. Krampus brings coal to bad children. Santa brings presents to good children.
The solution to bad data quality is one that needs to be implemented across an organization. It can’t just be left up to IT or sales or marketing; everyone needs to work together to improve the customer experience. When it comes down to it, your customers are the most important part of any business so giving them the best experience possible should be your top priority.