Key Concepts

If this is your first examination of Customer Master Data Management (CMDM), you should note that we have collated some info pages here under this page of Key Concepts.

With these perspectives, we provide you with relatively detailed concepts and describe how the Pretectum CMDM SaaS platform supports them in context.

The “single source of truth“, (SSOT) concerning customer master data records is known by many names. Among them, are “golden records“, “golden nominal“, “golden keys“, “single customer views“, record masters, etc. None of these descriptions is right or wrong, you simply need to understand that they have different meanings in different organizations and to different software vendors.

Customer master data records are organizational data assets that contain the most up-to-date and accurate information about the customer for day-to-day business operations. Customer, in this context, is more typically the consumer-type customer, however, it could also be a member, student, subscriber, or an employee or associate. Many of the characteristics of optimized CMDM are really about simply managing “people data”.

The customer master supports two main areas in the business: transactional processing, and data analytics. Traditionally the customer master is accessible and shared across the many departments of an organization to relate transactions. The master is used to support account management and to provide a basis for customer analysis and decision support.

Organizational divisions that depend on the customer master include but are not limited to, sales, service, support, logistics, finance and marketing as well as many others.

Foundations of CMDM in the wider organizational systems landscape

The customer master is the common source of data (name address phone etc) and often contains additional metadata (characteristics in a wider context like score or LTCV) along with corporate dimensional data like relationship management or account status.

By its nature, the customer master data records should be relatively stable, persistent and consistent. There should be no duplicates and the data should be fit for use in the business.

The practice of Customer Master Data Management itself involves the creation and management of customer records with all the critical data contained therein.

When Customer Master Data Management CMDM is perfectly executed, the customer master data being syndicated is the best it can be. Timely, accurate and reliable.