Author: ULI LOKSHIN

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Reimagining Customer Data

Brands and retailers need to reevaluate how they think about customer data

In a survey conducted by SuperOffice, it was found that 45.9% of business professionals are prioritizing customer service over products (20.5%) and price (33.6%).

There has been a customer revolution of late, brand loyalty is now not limited to just products or price; they are willing to invest more in a purchase if the customer service is above average.

It goes without saying, that customers want straightforward answers to their queries and that they appreciate brands that personalize the interaction experience from the start with offers that communicate clear expectations on what the customer can expect in return. Businesses that fail to customize the message and fail to personalize the offer in the presence (or absence ) of customer data are likely to leave customers disinterested or frustrated. Neither of these outcomes is desirable and puts retention and repeat purchases at risk.

Statistically speaking, brands that offer omnichannel experiences retain 89% of their customers compared to 33% of those that don’t. The reason this is an important “stat” to pay attention to, is that the old paradigm of perhaps exclusively engaging in business via brick-and-mortar stores often now sees those same customers expecting a digital experience too. Leveraging digital channels means that they can interact regularly with brands in a way that they couldn’t before. These could be by way of email, website chatbots, mobile apps, customer service chat sessions, Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, Telegram, and a host of other platforms and interaction methods.

If you believe that data can fuel your digital transformation journey then you will also recognize that it offers the potential for more interaction and communication consistency. By leveraging centrally stored well-managed detailed customer information, all manner of services and support can be made use of in the honing of the customer message to provide a personalized and distinctive customer experience.

Curbside Pickup as a data point

A curbside pickup service is one where retailers allow customers to place an order online for them to then self or courier pick up at a local store. In some respects, this is an evolution of drive-through with the principle difference being that curbside pickup can simply be an extension to normal pick and pack but without the ship part.

When the order is ready, the customer is notified, either by email, SMS, or mobile app message, and the consumer walks or drives to the store and in a designated area collects their order. In some instances, they may nominate a courier or home delivery service provider to make the collection for them. Either way, the seller is not responsible for collection/delivery beyond making the consignment available for pickup.

The COVID-19 pandemic saw demand for curbside pickup increase by 85%. Customers would often make this choice because they want to be safe and prefer the click-and-collect method instead of physically visiting the store.

For businesses that already supported a click-and-collect (C&C) operation, the pressure was more on whether infrastructure could cope with the increase in orders. For those who had never offered C&C the pressure was to implement the data capture mechanism for not just the customer details but also their payment processing, preferences, contact information, and an eCommerce or webshop element. The stores would also need to be geared up to do more order-based picking where previously the main focus would have been on shelf packing and checkout.

Connecting the web front with back-end systems may sound like a straightforward IT integration but often that would not be true where the logistics execution or point of sale systems operate in complete isolation from eCommerce and webshop systems. From the Pretectum perspective, this is where Customer Master Data Management can operate as a central hub for the many functional spokes that represent different aspects of business operations.

Data is key to aligning the customer experience

98% of Fortune 500 companies leverage data to enhance the customer experience. Businesses need to have a defined data strategy that helps them scale to an ever-evolving environment.

Business decisions and marketing initiatives are ideally driven by data insights and those are best established when they come from analyzing the various aspects of your customer’s data.

Your customer data management system can serve as your single source of truth and can neutralize the concept of data silos. Silos of customer data can be very common in businesses that have implemented systems and approaches to dealing with customers in an isolated and tactical way.

Every department that is potentially customer-facing, including sales, marketing, finance, service, and support, requires specific kinds of information to undertake its role. This information when stored separately can become fragmented, inconsistent, and incomplete. thereby making it difficult for other departments to access and draw conclusions that may be tied to the data held cross-operationally.

Data silos might seem harmless and fit for purpose through the narrow lens of a particular department or function but even within a narrow frame of focus, that data will develop inconsistencies over time. With so many business area-specific data silos popping up, it will be difficult for business leaders to draw appropriate conclusions and in turn provide customers with an optimized experience.

Breaking the silos is crucial for businesses. The route to this elimination of the silos is to provide data centralization and save time (and resources) that is spent on dealing with trying to create an optimized picture of the customer and the customer’s circumstances

 Customer Master Data Management offers the potential for the controlled flow of batched and real-time customer data through all appropriate business channels with a consistent and unified aspect.

Almost all C-suite execs believe that customer data is critical for their businesses to get ahead of competitors. Contact us for more information on the Pretectum CMDM solution and how it can give your business an advantage in reimagining the customer.

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Transforming gas, electric and water utilities

cable current danger distribution

For utility providers to remain competitive and stable in a climate of continuing economic uncertainty accompanied by somewhat unpredictable regulatory change, gas, electric and water utilities must improve the way that they think about and use customer data.

Top of mind for many in the utility sector will be the need to accelerate the replacement of rigid and geriatric customer information systems (CIS). To remain relevant to consumers they need to add new capabilities that enhance the customer service experience and enable consistent, successful up-sell and cross-sell capability.

At the centre of the CIS is the customer record, connected to one or more accounts and a plethora of supporting transactional systems that embrace everything from IoT to outbound communication like marketing and billing.

While the account is heavily dependent on the metering systems, many of which are IoT-enabled, the reality is that the customer master is not so dependent. The customer master in particular, with its potential for a multi-account relationship, is more important from credit risk, service delivery, optimization and discounting perspective.

Consumers are cost conscious and they expect the utility provider to understand the whole relationship that they have with them. Accordingly, they want account managers and customer service personnel to recognise that even as consumers they have a multi-faceted relationship with the provider.

If you’re responsible for customer data management for a utility provider then consider how you deal with multi-site consumer customers and how you maximize the experience and minimize the risk.

Pike Research, a unit of Navigant’s Energy Practice, projects that transformational initiatives fuel growth in the electric utility billing alone and CIS software and services market, and that has led to expenditures in excess of $5Bn.

The utility sector has historically been encumbered with legacy systems that barely evolve, and are hard to implement and change. These systems are also expensive to maintain. Though IoT is changing things, one residual of legacy is that a great deal of the data exchange between smart meters, billing systems and the like, is undertaken in batch mode rather than in real-time. There is also often compartmentalization of business functions that actually hampers a holistic approach to dealing with customers resulting in an overall poor experience. This in turn leads to a higher cost to serve.

Consider what your goals might be for improving the situation with customer master data management as a utility provider, and consider too what the benefits are that a unified API-enabled search, retrieve, edit and update capability for the customer master might bring. They could be any or all of the following:

  • Improved Reporting
  • Improved data privacy and regulatory compliance
  • Improved customer retention
  • Improved customer acquisition
  • Increased upsell and cross-sell
  • Real time insights
  • Real-time customer account self-service
  • Easier integration
  • An improved system and process support
  • Reduced risk

Pretectum’s CMDM is a customer master data management system that allows your utility organization to bring data from disparate sources and consolidate views of the data in those disparate sources into a single unified platform where you can curate customer records, create relationships between the data silos and zone in on a golden nominal customer record with cross references.

As a single source of truth related to the essential data that defines the customer, the Pretectum CMDM can be used as a hub for the many spokes of your utility organization, serving the needs of Marketing, Sales, Risk and Compliance, Accounting and Billing and Service and Support. Contact us today to learn how we can help.

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On premise Master Data Management software solutions

photo of person typing on computer keyboard

One of the questions that are likely to come up when considering master data management software solutions is going to be, how can we implement any solution that will address our master data management challenges?

There are of course myriad ways of implementing systems, depending on the technology stacks, age, and priority of the software product or solution vendor that you are working with.

I say this because historically the oldest master data management solution vendors started out with either mainframe or client-server implementations of their products. The plumbing of that solution therefore may be very old.

This is not to say that on-premise or an older and established MDM software solution is bad, it is simply to say that the technology stack and the existing investment that an older vendor has made in their platform, supports packaging it up into an installer or image that you can implement on-premise.

Pretectum is a SaaS product

The Pretectum CMDM is built with the latest shared infrastructure technologies, this has been done to ensure that we can keep the price of the solution low, the versions in use, up to date, and consistent across all customers, and the varieties of supported implementation styles to a minimum.

This means, unfortunately, that while your data may be on-premise in your other systems of record, the only way that you could use the Pretectum CMDM is by connecting it to your other systems across the internet.

While the prospect of having your customer master data contained in a repository that is not on-premise may be a scary prospect, you can rest assured that we’ve made every effort to secure the data in a number of ways that makes it probably more secure than the customer data that you have on-premise!

Pretectum’s CMDM also supports the four most common master data management software solution implementation styles, namely: Consolidated, Registry, Coexistent and Centralized. You can learn more about the different approaches from a previous post.

If you’re a small-to-midsize business that is budget conscious and looking for a less hands-on approach, you might consider cloud-based.

Daniel Munk President at FenceCore IT Solutions

5 reasons SaaS is better than on-premise

Consider how much it costs your business to source hardware either through outright purchase or lease, and build out or maintain a data center or server room with uninterruptible power and redundant network connectivity. With SaaS, you pay a monthly fee which includes the provisioning and the availability of the platform.

What do you do when the hardware that you have is now inadequate because you’ve outgrown the initial implementation or the latest version of the software needs more resources?

That’s a good problem to have on face value, it means your business is growing or that the software vendor is producing new versions of their software.

Nonetheless, who will do the backups and restores and the upgrade migration to the new platform and how do you accommodate the budget and investment in the new hardware and the supporting the migration?

With SaaS, there isn’t a backup and restore or scaling issue.

The SaaS platform is continuously operational and backed up and the implementation of new versions is done with regression testing at the forefront of any changes done to the platform. The need for full data recovery is a very rare event. Even when recovery is required, the SaaS vendor is responsible for making that happen.

As for scaling, modern SaaS platforms like the Pretectum CMDM are designed to scale to thousands of different customer implementations with hundreds of millions of customer records in each customer implementation. No need to worry about database administration on this front either, since that’s a task for the SaaS development and operations team.

Additional Reading

I thought that the following articles might prove to be valuable for you in exploring more about why a SaaS platform is different and might be better for your requirements.

Contact us today to learn more about why we think the Pretectum CMDM platform for Customer master data management may be the best choice for your business.