Customer Master data management (CMDM) is itself a process that creates a uniform set of customer data for use by different functions and systems across the organization.
The approach to implementing a CMDM like the Pretectum CMDM varies according to the needs of the organization, the maturity of the organization’s data management practices, and the specific needs that a CMDM might be decided upon to address.
The successful adoption of a CMDM is dependent on your organization’s understanding of its overarching objectives for customer data management and the degree of rigor that will be placed around the creation, access, modification, and syndication of the customer master data.
What is Master Data and what is not?
The first aspect your organization needs to work out is what it really considers master data versus “other” data. It is a common misconception, that everything contained within the customer master in the CRM, ERP, or CDP, is master data.
Oftentimes, there is data in the customer master that is transient, temporary, and continuously changing. It is important to understand whether you need to centrally manage or distribute that data from a CMDM hub or whether this can simply be referenced through data relationships.
Details such as contracts, transactional aggregates, various pieces of metadata, and relationships between master records may not be essential for all those that might need access to the customer master in the CMDM. Your CMDM may simply be the convergence point of multiple external keys to a single unifying key with some basic customer attributes.
Where is the Master Data?
It is important to take stock of where your existing customer master data presently lies and is held. Our experience is that most organizations hold customer master data in the core transaction processing systems. This could be POS, ERP, CRM or even a CDP or marketing database. Generally, wherever sales or customer-related transactional events are captured and executed, you will find some sort of customer master.
Transactions are also not necessarily limited to sales. Transactions might also encompass service, support, and maintenance transactional events and of course, in the healthcare industry, these may be consultations.
Pretectum will allow you to create relationships between all of these sources and present a unified view of the customer even if the same or similar data is held across multiple repositories.
Data ownership and responsibilities
It is useful to understand who the users of the customer master are, it is also particularly useful to understand who is responsible and accountable for the maintenance of customer data particularly when it comes to aspects such as corrections, data minimization, consent, and subject access requests in the context of compliance.
The Pretectum CMDM will track and trace all changes made against the centralized data repository and the ability to make changes is all subject to a least access permissions model but from an auditing, control, and data governance perspective, it is always important to understand who has access to customer data and why they need that access.
Users of the platform can be afforded limited access to specific datasets and can be given limited or full capabilities around the creation, editing and archiving of customer records.
Establishing a common definition of customer
Settling on a common description for the customer is an ideal way to communicate a unified understanding of the customer master but we completely understand if that is too rigid an expectation for your organization or if you don’t feel comfortable with consolidating the data from multiple repositories to a single repository.
If your preference is to converge all data on a common data schema, the platform supports this also. You can define a superset of data that encompasses all possible data attributes even if contributing data feeds do not contain some of those attributes. The data from those sources remains identifiable but can also be translated with new labels and identifiers.
Data Quality management
A critical aspect of any customer master data management program is ensuring that the customer master is in the best shape it can be. That means that all mandatory fields are populated and that all data is relevant, accurate, consistent, and appropriate, this is effectively customer data management data quality assessment. Identification of potential duplicates reduces the overall footprint of the customer master and reduces and often eliminates confusion and redundancy in customer interactions.
With the Pretectum CMDM, the data schema definition drives data quality management by assessing the data captured in the platform relative to the business rules that you have defined for that data in the schema. Identification of duplicates and remediation thereof becomes a follow-on activity that is also possible.
Finally, consider that customer master data management is continuously evolving in your business. The business rules that you define today may be superseded by new or improved rules tomorrow and whatever processes and technology you put in place, need to be able to adapt and evolve with your business.
Contact us today to find out how the Pretectum CMDM can help with your Customer Master Data Management Process.