Author: Juwel

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The customer redefined

cityscape photography near water

Google the concept of customer 360 and you will get a lot of different kinds of answers, most of them will focus on having a perfected view of what the customer looks like and a lot of the focus is on merging the many digital identities that a customer has.

The reality though, is that no additional transactional, social or other data pertaining to the customer helps you to get closer to the customer if you don’t have a clear understanding of what a customer really is and all the essential attributes that form the meaningful shape of the customer for your business.

The clarity of the definition of the customer is further compromised when you consider that the many operational silos of a business have different expectations and requirements around customer data itself.

Then, finally, there is the matter of systems of record. Whether it be ERP, CRM or a CDP, if those systems are defining the attributes that matter as it relates to the concept of ‘customer’; are they elaborate and comprehensive enough to actually adequately address the diverse needs of the business?

While it can be easily understood that an isolated system for mastering the customer is not of much value, a customer master that supports connectivity to various sources and targets can operate as a data syndication hub that cannot only ingest but also distribute customer master data in a way that regulates and manages customer data.

An important aspect of considering customer master data management has to be the consideration of where you can realistically intercept and control customer data as it is created, edited and used.

B2B vs B2C Customers

For many organizations, the process of onboarding B2B customers starts with a contact or a lead.

This may contain very limited information about the customer or prospect and is typically all wrapped up in the role of the individual and the way that lead was sourced. Imagine a situation then, where every lead itself starts out classified as the primary customer but then, as your relationship with the individual develops, their record morphs into a customer record. This is one way that customers get created.

A second approach to B2B customer creation is very process and system-oriented and in some respects incompatible with the way data is harvested in the real world. This approach requires you to create a customer master ‘shell’ to attach a lead to. This is a common approach and one that carries much more rigor and potential process design flaws if you want to arrive at a quality customer record. Using this ‘shell’ approach often leads to incompatibility in terms of data creation timelines and a great deal of friction in the customer onboarding process. Additionally, adding customers directly in ERP, CRM or the CDP without gating criteria may lead to a great deal of duplication and partial record creation that will need to be addressed at some point.

Click on the image for a better view of the capabilities
Click on the image for a better view of the capabilities

The B2C customer is different again, sometimes the curation of the customer record is by the customer themselves, on other occasions the customer record is acquired or inferred from an eCommerce or retail transaction or a sign up to some other system like loyalty, a donation, a service record or a cold-call or inquiry.

Imagine, a system that can support both B2B and B2C customer master data management scenarios but one where the B2B customer is derived from one or more customer records that start out as leads and are then relegated to contact status by virtue of your nomination of data attributes that constitute the best possible B2B customer record. This derivation approach can also be applied to B2C customers but leveraging a great many aspects of what your organization deems critical customer data.

The Pretectum CMDM will support your organization in tackling all of these different kinds of ways of thinking about customer data curation. If you’d like to learn more, why not reach out to us and find out more?

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Does Life Imitate Art or does Art Imitate Life?

a woman imitating a painting of a woman holding a flower

If you’re the kind of person who browses social media, visits markets, museums and galleries then the chances are, that you will come across things that have been created as a tribute, copy or parody of real things in life.

It could be a meme, it could be a photo, a cartoon, an animated image, a short video clip, a painting, sculpture or even a T-shirt print.

When you consider what art is, it is “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” That’s the Oxford Languages dictionary definition at least.

In much the same way that these creative works emulate aspects of reality or flights of fantasy, many, often come down to a re-representation of something factual or known. Precision is often not required and the “artistic license” may be applied in such a way that in fact only the vaguest allusion to reality is represented.

We can’t do that with data though, or at least not the data that we would hope to use in forging strong relationships with customers. Accordingly, we need a little more structure, a little more definition and a better framing of the representation of the customer, such that we are in fact imitating as much about the customer as we can, in a meta-way.

The Art of Data

In the world of Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) we can best achieve that by defining the characteristics that we believe matter, in relation to describing customers.

Click on the image for a better view of the platform
Defining the Customer Schema in Pretectum – Click on the image for a better view of the platform

Once we have that definition, we’re in a much better position to provide detailed and summarized interpretations and representations of the customer entity, such that we can work out how well or how poorly our data management program is functioning and also to build summarized and detailed data analytics stories about customers, customer journeys and customer experiences.

In some respects you could say, that the ability to appropriately represent what we know about our customers to be ‘artful’ in servicing their individual and collective needs, is absolutely tied to our correct imitation of who, what and how customers are, in our various systems of record and reporting systems. Failure to create a good quality digital twin or digital simulation of the customers will ultimately detract from our ability to serve the market and the individual adequately.

No matter the industry segment that your business functions in, the ability to Know your Customers (KYC) and understand their needs, wants, preferences and tastes, puts your business in a much stronger position in sharp contrast with your competitors.

Customers want personalized, intimate engagement, particularly for high value purchases, they also want friendly, frequent and convenient communication on their own terms; that means that you need to know who they are, know what they like and afford them the courtesy of indicating their preferences.

About Pretectum

Although the Pretectum platform is focused purely on Customer MDM, it affords your business the ability to define any number of critical key traits that your business might care to digitally imitate, about your customers. This means that if your model of engagement is highly personalized, with high touch and direct engagement by your associates, you need to empower those associates with as much suitable information as possible in order to service those customers optimally.

The Pretectum CMDM platform allows you to define those essential customer characteristics and more. Further, the platform allows you to layer in Customer Master Data Governance (MDG) in a variety of different ways according to the approach that makes the most sense for your business.

Contact us today to learn more.