When was the last time you did something really innovative with your customer data? In fact, does your customer data actually support you in cranking up your use of your data assets in response to the changing market?
In many businesses, sweating data assets like customer data happens all the time, but in some cases, it is really hard to do for a great many reasons.
Some of the reasons that impair your ability to leverage customer data assets include compliance and regulatory control. Others are siloed data, an inability to nail down a true customer data owner, the burden of reshaping the data in just the way you need it in order to follow through on an idea, or the most common one, plainly defective data or data with poor data quality.
There’s a lot at stake if you don’t exercise your customer data regularly. Data erodes over time, even if it doesn’t fundamentally change. People change their contact data, they pass away, relocate, marry or simply change their preferences and behaviour.
It doesn’t take much for all that great data that you possibly had at the time of capture, to become irrelevant. The fastest path to irrelevance is most definitely, your own business’ inability to deal with evolutionary change in the data and the underlying characteristics of the people and organizations that it represents.
Change has everything to do with speed and currency. When the speed of change around your organization is faster than the speed of change within, you see organizational obsolescence. That obsolescence begins with the data but can quickly permeate into the actual DNA of the business.
Voice over IP technologies, for example, revolutionized long-distance phone calls. New technology destroyed the idea that you needed to pay for the distance of the voice circuit and the time of day that you called. In fact, the idea today, that you should pay for minutes is an anathema for the next generation of workers.
What does this mean for your business?
This is just one example of how you need to rethink the status quo and reconsider what matters and what is relevant. For any business that stores customer data, it is essential to keep that data current and relevant to the evolving world in which we live. The only way to do this is to leverage technologies that are combined with business processes that support a new way of working.
To achieve this you need to warm up your customer data assets, just as you would stretch your muscles ahead of any strenuous exercise. You need to assess what you have, define the rules that relate to the purpose or intent you have in mind for the data, and then verify that what you have, will fit the purpose you have in mind. If you fail to do the warm-up, in the form of a data definition and assessment, then you risk diving headlong into an initiative that will suffer the friction typically associated with projects built on data with poor data quality.
The Pretectum approach to addressing these essential steps is to provide you with a way to define what you need as a minimum. Define what constitutes acceptable or gating criteria and then stage and assess the data assets that you have at hand to determine fit.
Data that doesn’t meet your expectations can be peeled off from the good data and dealt with separately. The best data that you have can be leveraged to finish the race and in fact, used multiple times for follow on activities.
Pretectum feeds into not only your operational needs on a day-to-day basis but also your long-term goals of getting as close and as intimate with your customers as they will allow.
In the end, the result is a win-win for you and the customer. The customer feels valued and can be rewarded and your business can grow and thrive confidently in the knowledge that the data that you have at hand is relevant, appropriate, and approved.
Find out more about how Pretectum’s Customer MDM can help your business can put its customer data through its paces so that you can run any race and be confident that you will finish it successfully.