You’ll hear not just here, but elsewhere too. customer data is one of the most valuable assets for a company. The reason is for the insights and indicators that customer data brings.
Companies that use customer insights have been reported by McKinsey, to outperform competitors by as much as 85%.
Gartner defines master data management (MDM) as a “technology-enabled discipline in which business and IT work together to ensure the accuracy, consistency, accountability and stewardship of the enterprise’s official shared master data assets”.
When used to the best effect, customer data informs a business’ upsell strategies and drives more targeted marketing.
Businesses embarking on digital transformation, rely on quality customer data and spend a lot of time, energy and money ensuring the accuracy and usability of the customer master. One way to increase the value of customer data is through Customer Master Data Management.
With Customer MDM, you’re seeking to use a unified, accurate, and persistent identifier for customers as well as other attributes that describe them. That MDM can drive business outcomes when used with analytical and operational systems.
MDM is a business practice but it can also be a technology – a new data processing system like the Pretectum SaaS CMDM. Customer Data Platforms on the other hand (CDP) are a form of packaged software that focuses on customer-relevant data – this may include transaction and master data but most often, the CDP is targeted at marketers and marketing departments.
It’s important for brands to provide personalized content to customers but how is that best done? Customer data, attributes such as how long a customer has spent on your website or their preferences or where they live can provide important knowledge to optimize marketing and sales efforts and that same data in the CDP could be coming from the CMDM so that it is consistent across all systems.
MDM as a practice benefits all sizes of organizations and MDM solutions have general business benefits too, they’re not focused exclusively on one function or group.
Research suggests that personalization programs, when deployed at scale, can improve sales and marketing drastically. Personalization at scale helps businesses to connect with their customers in meaningful ways but to achieve this, you need to have the data and the MDM is the best place to store and maintain those essential data nuggets.
Master Data Management platforms and Customer Data Platforms both exist to create that pipeline of accurate, reliable customer information. Unlike a CDP the MDM solution is mainly used by the business to drive more general operational effectiveness and efficiency and customer experience whereas the CDP is mainly used to target messaging and personalization for the individual or households at the campaign level.
Customer data mastering has some important attributes. Firstly, mastery is achieved by consistently matching and integrating customer data from different enterprise sources. This is done by tying together customer records spread through the different systems and then combining them into a unified cluster of related records that provides a 360-degree customer data profile.
The concept of “knowing your customer” (KYC) is only achieved if you actually have an understanding of all the attributes that make up that customer. That means you have to have a consolidated view of that customer (or prospect) based on all the different ways that they have engaged with your business.
This encompasses in-store purchasing, online purchasing, service, support and finance. Companies can only use customer knowledge to create successful business relationships if that unified understanding of the customer then translates into a better customer experience (CX).
Customer data can also help provide input for the business roadmap and help to build capabilities and product offerings for shoppers in the future. Customer insight through customer master data is essential for businesses to understand how the ideal customer thinks and acts. Through optimized MDM, organizations now have the ability to understand what drives their customers via customer data, rather than relying on guesswork.
Errors in customer data can create problems in all areas of the business. Incorrect customer deliveries are perhaps less likely these days but using old customer data or data that is not optimized can create inefficiencies in other areas like marketing outreach.
Resolving and fixing mistakes, in particular, is expensive, the later in the data management process that they are detected the more difficult and more effort is required to remediate so identifying and intercepting problems sooner rather than later is a more economical approach.
Sales teams spend a good amount of time interacting with customer data and are likely to identify problem data but do they actually do anything about it? The chances are no, they don’t necessarily see it as part of their remit, further, if there is a bureaucratic process associated with data correction or risk and compliance measures that block them from doing those corrections then they are even less likely to be resolved.
You want to move your business from engaging in less time correcting errors and more time working on business expansion efforts like lead generation and lead follow-up. Inaccurate data will slow down lead conversion because marketing, sales, service and support representatives are potentially using outdated or erroneous information.
Key sources of customer data are ERPs, CRMs, marketing automation platforms, and customer data platforms but they are often siloed and focused on very specific business missions that don’t have a unified view of the customer as an overarching objective.
Persistent IDs that you’ll find in a customer master data management system like Pretectum’s CMDM ultimately help connect those disparate customer records and make it easier to see the customer in a single record. Customers with the same information will be related to another thereby ensuring your associates have an accurate and consistent understanding of all the data attributes of the customer.
Deduplication, spotting wrong or duplicate records ensures that the same underlying customer is converged upon, this can be done using AI data aggregation or manually but at scale automation is the best way to do this effectively. Analytics and reporting improve as a result of this information optimization and changes are can be quickly effected.
Data mastering is difficult to scale with traditional manual and rule-based methods, often there is a lot of manual input – this is potentially costly and complicated when dealing with a large volume of data. Pretectum’s CMDM solves this through integration and bulk append and replacement capabilities.
Customer data management is crucial to long-term customer relationship management and needs to be handled in a way that ensures the organization is complying with local, regional and international regulations. The data management process touches more than just marketing and sales because it also includes financial, legal and perhaps even IT teams. All need to be able to work together to ensure the approach to customer data quality is appropriate, fair and compliant.
Customer data management through the use of CMDM helps businesses grow their customer base in a responsible and appropriate way in support of marketing, sales, support and service initiatives. Managing and using customer data appropriately helps increase profitability, business growth, and ROI.
A CMDM becomes the hub that connects your different customer data sources and provides a centralized customer information analysis point to serve better customer-company relationships. The Pretectum CMDM provides data management dashboards and real-time analysis, which can make for more improved real-time interaction management decisions.
Pretectum’s customer MDM platform is not a replacement for your ERP, CRM, CDP, or DMP but rather a complementary tool that is especially helpful for integration. Your customer Master Data Management Strategies with the Pretectum CMDM can also cover a wide array of data types and approaches to customer master data management with a lot of options that can be mandatory or optional according to your business needs.
Consider the Pretectum CMDM for identity management or golden record creation, market segmentation, customer classification or simply to drive compliance and operational efficiency.