Category: CMDM

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Coping with a copycat culture

grayscale photo of a can

Copying as a business culture is rampant. It is worth debating then, whether your organization is itself a victim of this practice or is genuinely innovative and creative.

With industry pundits all applauding the behaviors of a select few icons it is little wonder that emulating those icons is so commonplace.

Organizations that copy are relegated to follower, not leader positions and that might be ok if you’re always content on just getting the leavings. The problem is that behind you, there may be 101 more copycats or followers that will erode your customer base and effectively pull customers from you; so unless you’re actively cloning and copying continuously, you’re in an endless cycle with no end in sight unless you change your approach.

“You’ll never have a product or price advantage again. They can be easily duplicated, but a strong customer service culture can’t be copied.” 

Jerry Fritz, Director of Management Institute University of Wisconsin

eCommerce retailer Motley, calls this out in their post on Copycat Culture. In that article, they were clearly miffed that someone had plagiarized their distinctive blue l’Oiseau ring design with the intention of capitalizing on their brand and design uniqueness.

While imitation might be written off as flattery, it only really works if there is equivalent quality and Motley believe that the copycats didn’t manage to meet the quality mark for various reasons.

Nimbletank‘s CX report conducted with over 500 CX leaders indicated that as much as 88% of retail brands have changed their risk-taking profile as physical stores stayed shut.

In their words “Retail brands genuinely needed to reconnect to their customer base, to understand how their needs had changed. It does therefore come as somewhat of a surprise, and let’s face it, contradiction, that the biggest driver for CX investment in the past 15 months has actually been… copying competitors.”

Industry analysts, Gartner, claim that 81% of brands compete mostly or completely on the basis of the customer experience (CX), which then makes the customer experience a key competitive differentiator between brands.

Distinguishing your business from competitors

There is one aspect of your business and quality that may be really hard to emulate. That’s your customer service culture. It’s an integral part of the customer experience. Do you believe your organization has a distinctive customer service culture? If not, perhaps it is something to examine.

We’d all like to think of our business as innovative or creative but the reality is that sustaining innovation and creativity is time-consuming and relatively expensive and more importantly, it has to be a part of your organizational culture. Newer businesses sometimes just don’t have the capital, history, and resources to produce entirely unique products and services in perpetuity.

As another writer described it, “Copying is ‘sucking up‘ to the best in class” and it is something that has been going on, forever.

Pretectum believes that how you communicate and interact with your customers by leveraging data, can be a “game-changer” in the customer service and customer experience space. By taking advantage of good quality customer data in imaginative and creative ways, your business can either continue to hold your lead or in fact disrupt the market and derail copycats through your customer master data assets that are hard to replicate.

By focusing on your customer data assets and how you use those for design, service, and support, you empower your employees to bring products and solutions to market that are specifically designed for the customers that you have and desire to have. Your outbound messaging and communications can be customized to provide your customers and prospects with personalized and relevant narratives that can become a dialogue rather than simply an easily discardable advertisement.

The time has never been better for you to consider whether your business wants to maintain its advantage. Contact us to learn how we can help you with your customer master data management needs.

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OKR’s for MDM and MDG

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Objectives and Key Results ( OKR ) are how you measure the effectiveness of the pursuit you have of some organization goal.

Master Data Management ( MDM ) is the umbrella term used to describe the people, processes, and technology that your business uses for the collection and management of master data, including the definition of schemas, business rules, sources, and targets. In our case, we’re most particularly interested in the customer master. What, when, and where.

Master Data Governance ( MDG ) is another umbrella term that is often used to describe the technology, people, and processes that revolve around the handling, onboarding, syndication, and control of the master data itself. This process is also considerate of MDM but is more concerned with the process aspects. Who, when, and how. We think of MDG as a subset of MDM focused principally on coordinated handling and control.

Standardization of the way data is created and the key attributes of the data object are key to ensuring that the master data that you have for customers, in particular, is correct, proper and aligned with your defined business objectives.

Pretectum sees the collection process as necessarily a part of the responsibility of any MDM. MDG’s role in this is ensuring that the right players and participants are involved and that they cannot engage in tasks that are out of alignment with the rules of the system. MDM and MDG don’t have to be separate systems, though sometimes they are. In the context of Pretectum’s CMDM you get MDM and lightweight MDG as a single unified capability.

Rules for governance and management

At the highest level, this means that the customer master makes use of a common vocabulary across all business units in relation to how the customer master is described. This also means that all sources and targets in relation to that data use a common set of descriptors also. This is really only possible if you make use of a unified repository that is leveraged to describe that data. Consider what kind of vocabulary items you need for your business, who defines them, who maintains them and how they are communicated and leveraged. Vocabulary objects could be part of your OKRs.

The second set of characteristics of a standardized approach to data collection and distribution (Data syndication in Pretectum speak) is full data lifecycle management, which basically means the delivery of a degree of understanding on the lineage of data in relation to sources, but also a full auditable history of events related not only to the data itself but also the metadata that constitutes the descriptions in that vocabulary. Consider the key results that you might want to leverage to assess MDM standardization practices in your organization. Proof of sustained and consistent standardization might serve as a great OKR.

The third aspect is one in which you have a clear definition of all the entities involved in the data lifecycle management. This includes, systems and people but also describes their roles. responsibilities and data ownership, stewardship, and curatorship roles. This needs to be formally described in order to assist in decision-making and triage of issues. Assessing consistency in your people, object, and organization definitions is a commonly measured attribute and one that is often considered a good DMO (Data Management Organization) OKR.

Why do we do all this?

The answer quite simply is that if you don’t have these three essential traits in your customer data management approach then your business may be flying blind with heaps of customer master data that are not being appropriately, or cannot even be used, to maximum effect for the business.

These are the ideals though, and at the same time, you need to look to the relative customer master data management maturity that your organization has. Sometimes, the technology is really not going to help and an overbearing level of process management and control will actually impair the effectiveness of your data management efforts.

Your approach, therefore, needs to be tempered by something practical and pragmatic, something that recognizes that data management is often a journey. In the end, your business’ faith and confidence in its customer data, should be influential and informative but at the same time, your business needs to have greater ambition for how and what customer data is collected and how it is leveraged.

Contact us to learn more about how you can consider Pretectum’s C-MDM to elevate your business OKR’s around MDM and MDG.

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Making wishes come true

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Make people who aren’t your customers wish that they were. Sounds easy right? We know it is easier to say it than it is to make it happen but we do have some thoughts about how the way you interact with your customers and prospects may just influence them in a way you hadn’t considered.

“Even the best of what formerly passed for good customer service is no longer enough” – we’re sure you agree, that the way your customers have come to expect personal interaction, is radically different today as compared with what it likely looked like even just a year ago. 

The reality is that your customers are evolving, and with them, their expectations. Today, every member of your sales, support, and service team needs to function as a customer concierge. 

A concierge ([kɔ̃sjɛʁʒ]) is an employee of a multi-tenant building, such as a hotel or apartment building, who receives guests. The concept has been applied more generally to other hospitality settings and to personal concierges who manage the errands of private clients. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concierge

Even if your business isn’t in hospitality, your staff need to do everything they can, to make every prospect and customer, feel recognized, acknowledged, appreciated, and heard. They all want to feel special 

As Gary Vaynerchuk, states in The Thank You Economy – “You have to make them feel special, just like when your great-grandmother walked into Butcher Bob’s shop or bought her new hat, and you need to make people who aren’t your customers wish they were.”

So how exactly can your business do that?

At Pretectum, we think the answer lies in the data. If you have the data, you can leverage it.

Three circles with CMDM at the center.
Three circles with CMDM at the center.

If you don’t have the data, you can embark on a data gathering and data collection exercise that will empower your teams and fuel your technologies for improved messaging and personalization – customizing the whole customer experience in a way that is aligned with their preferences, passions, and interests.

With the Pretectum CMDM solution, you’re able to take advantage of a platform that supports centrally managed customer master data for small or large groups in a unified or an isolated way, according to the specific way in which your business prefers to have data governance organized.

Forging good customer relations

In retail good customer relations include remembering and appreciating repeat customers, creating local connections with shoppers, putting product knowledge to good use, and of course much more. A great deal of this can be augmented with data that your business has in relation to those customers provided you take the trouble to capture it and harvest insights from it.

If you’ve ever spent any time dealing with an older established department store you will know that many of them have staff who are “personal shoppers” – people who help others shop by giving advice and making suggestions.

You’ll still find them in some high-end stores but of course, smaller retailers can do this themselves simply by training their retail staff to be more attentive and personalized and less transactional. Personal shoppers are often employed by department stores and boutiques, although some are freelance or work exclusively online.

Often with a focus particularly on apparel, the reality though, is that personal shopping can also apply to non-clothing retail – such as furniture, and specialized fields like electronics, vehicles, and travel – offering personal shopping services is on the rise.

As consumers, we will tend to appreciate the store owner who remembers the repeat customer. One of the easiest ways to support your staff in being able to do that is by providing customers with a unique way of being identified, like a loyalty card; and storing essential information that relates to the relationship with the customer in a point of sale, service or support system.

At the swipe or scan of a card or phone, your staff can surprise and delight key customers with personalized service which will drive positive retention. All your repeat “known” customers are likely to be your best ones’s they’ll be very appreciative of a retail experience that is finely attuned to them and their loyalty

So, make it a point to let your frequent customers know that you’re grateful for their purchases by taking advantage of the data that you have about them, every time you interact with them.

Put all that info you have in your CDP, CRM, and ERP to good use by augmenting your systems with a single source of customer truth – a customer master data management system.

Once you have their information you’ll be sure to be able to use that customer data to serve your customers better.

The customer experience is more than important ever. You’re doing business in an environment where consumers have more choices than they have ever had before. How you interact with them can be a huge differentiating factor and it can turn indifferent shoppers into raving fans.