Customer centricity

It is said that the one constant is change. And, while that’s true for most things, it is especially true for our need to have a good understanding of the customer. Customers and their circumstances are continuously changing, despite our desire for that to be the one thing that remains relatively static.

It is most important in this day and age, given the speed with which things are changing, that we somehow work out a way to cope with higher velocity change while maintaining consistency and ensuring the quality of the data that we rely upon.

For businesses, the rate and scope of change are massive.

Organisations are not only having to cope with evolutionary changes in the technologies that are in common use, but they are also clamouring to cope with the shift in customer preferences and behaviours.

Disruptors exist in almost every industry segment from banking and financial services through retail and fashion to primary healthcare and education.

The customer sits at the centre of the business, they may be your business’ whole raison d’être, yet, many organizations continue to lag in thinking long and hard about how digital transformation can fuel their customer centricity.

A transformation in thinking and approaches to data is the first step in becoming customer-centric.

IDC research suggests as much as 85% of enterprise decision-makers say they working against the clock in their digital transformation efforts. If they fail, they will fall behind their competitors and suffer financially.

Who you communicate with, who you consider when devising your products, who you sell to, who you ship to, who you seek market validation from, who you please and who ultimately pays you are important ‘who’ for your business to understand and the best way to understand them is to maintain good records about them.

If you don’t think that they are the centre of your world, perhaps you should.

The unified customer experience

To thrive businesses need to innovate, reinvent and invigorate old business models with new thinking.

Subscription models, mobile transaction handling, virtual services and more are commonplace contemporary phenomena.

Businesses are being forced to up their online presence game and provide clients with a personalized and self-service curated view of their own data as held by those businesses they most often interact with, curating their own persona, their avatar and their data attributes.

Customers want to and need to own the digital representation of themselves in ways that they have never asked before.

To feed this digital engagement, every entity needs the fundamental building blocks that make up a good systems architecture – at the centre of that is the customer master.

Duplicated and incomplete customer master records make this a challenge not only for the business but for the customer too. What’s needed is a unified and coherent way to curate the customer master in a way that is elegant, robust, comprehensive, valid and still flexible.

Instead of piece-meal customer record management across disparate systems and platforms, the Pretectum customer master enables your business to define what matters and maintain it together with your business partners and the customers themselves.

Forget about the data silos and data islands of yesteryear and set sail for a fresh new perspective on the customer master record – the Pretectum Customer Master Data Management platform.