A customer persona is a detailed description of the ideal customer which is representative of your target audience. Although a persona is fictional, it is based on research.
You may hear of different kinds of personas, buyer personas, audience personas, or marketing personas. These are pretty much referring to all the same thing, however just as business units all have slightly different needs and objectives in relation to customer master data, so too, the personas that are typifications of the customer are relevant also, within the same organization they may be describing the exact same thing but think about that persona with a different label.
In master data management it is important to also recognize that personas are important in considering how you will set up your Pretectum CMDM roles and responsibilities. As with any sophisticated data management program, not everyone needs to have access and insights into every aspect of business operations, configuration, and control.
Accordingly, although there are some basic ways to set up user access that are efficient, they are not necessarily optimal for the segregation of duties, access control, privacy, and compliance. Considering your MDM personas is pivotal in establishing an effective master data management program with Pretectum’s CMDM at the center of how you manage your customer master data.
Why personas might matter
Large organizations often have multi-departmental or division-specific customer databases, these databases are walled off from one another with the department or division-specific access.
This division is done to facilitate the specific needs of the business area without cross-contamination or the risk of compromises to the data. The problem with this setup is that it promotes duplication of customers and when there is a data attribute that needs updating, like customer address, every part of the business needs to be informed.
For the customer, this makes no sense at all. For example, the bank that I deal with may have a checking, savings, mortgage, credit card, and an insurance account for me. The old way of having each of these areas of the business running its own customer master meant that I would have to notify each of these business areas that my details had changed.
Now, if the operations side of the business had had the foresight to have a customer service team have access to the customer masters in all these systems then the only risk is transcription differences (assuming the CSR has access to all the systems). Another way might be to have these systems all magically synchronize against one system of record using IT integrations. This approach is not always possible and sometimes expensive.
The Pretectum CMDM implementation gives you many choices. One choice is the preservation of all of the multiple copies of the customer but that could make your life very complicated. The preferred approach is one of a single centralized customer master that is available to all parts of the business as required.
We cover this in the concept of how you might approach customer MDM in your organization.
Taking your multiple customer masters and converging on a single customer master can be done within the Pretectum CMDM platform without necessarily compromising on the overall intent that you might have, with respect to separating and isolating access based on personas.
The reason to consolidate to a single customer master is to serve customers and the business better.
Contact us to learn how you can maintain your divisional segregation but benefit from a unified single view of the customer.