Tag: 360

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The case for CMDM in your existing systems landscape

hot air ballons in the sky

Ask any hill-walker or mountaineer why they do what they do and the answer you get might be surprising. Sometimes the main reason that they do what they do is for where the journey ultimately takes them.

Do you know why the view from the top is worth the climb? This is because it gives you a single view of everything laid out before you. It is the same appeal as ballooning and even flying for some…

The same is true with Master Data Management. The “hard climb” to a unified single source of customer data, gives you a single ‘clear’ picture of the customer.

The goal of every business is to acquire customers, give a top-notch customer experience, and retain customers while acquiring more. To achieve this goal, you’d have to crank up your data strategy to align with your business strategy.

It is worthy of note, though, that many businesses already have their customer data stored across many different systems, making it easily accessible for various teams and departments in the organization.

That, indeed, is good thinking. But is that really enough? Does that give a ‘view from the top’? Think of it this way, if a customer’s data is updated in one of the many systems available in your organization, that change would not automatically reflect across other systems, would it? In all likelihood not.

If you have adopted Customer Master Data Management in your business as a master system where all customer data is collated, updated, and reflected from every single system across the company, centralized, accurate, and consistent then you are at a distinct advantage when compared with your competitors who may still be at the bottom of the hill.

Without consistency across systems, business decisions will be made based on faulty or inaccurate data. And this could have catastrophic consequences for a business, like giving a bad customer experience, resulting in poor customer retention, which in turn leads to revenue loss.

Another major challenge that Customer Master data Management solves is the potential for a personalized customer experience. Customers anticipate experiences that are valuable and relevant to their needs. They expect brands to know them enough to deliver an overall excellent personalized experience.

Personalizing customer experience can be difficult when your data resides in numerous disconnected systems and in departments that don’t communicate with each other in real time. With CMDM, a single yet overall view of customers, related to their buying patterns, choices and preferences is the goal. This ensures that businesses can predict and pitch products or services that are most likely to match their customers’ needs.

Today, there are so many businesses out there taking advantage of different business strategies and isolated repositories. Customers have many options to choose from in terms of who they choose to do business with. What sets you apart from your competitors should be your accurate, high-quality data, that gives you insight into who your customers are, what they want, where they want it, and how they want it.

The only thing standing in your way to staying fixed in the heart of your customers. is your Customer Master Data Management. If your Organization embraced CMDM today, you wouldn’t be at the level of other businesses. Instead, you’d be standing right high up with a 360-degree view of your customers, driving new business opportunities. And in that instance, you’d realize, it was worth the climb!

Find out how Pretectum CMDM can help your business climb that hill or mountain.

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Digital transformation depends on effective customer data management

woman using vr goggles outdoors

There has been an incredible amount of technological change that impacts our everyday lives. The advent of the internet, social media, mobile and more, have changed how customers interact with brands, hence the need for change from brands.

It is the need for that change, that drives effective digital transformation.  

Digital transformation can mean different things for different organizations. It can mean launching e-commerce or a mobile app. For some, it could be about improving the web experience.

Whether you’re already an online business that needs a transformation initiative to engage markets that have not been targeted or an offline brand that realizes that a negative digital brand experience can be damaging to customer experience, loyalty, and reputation, you’ll be considering some kind of digital transformation, even if you don’t refer to it as such.

One of the many goals of digital transformation is to create insights and data points that will improve the customer experience with the intent of increasing sales, loyalty, and brand advocacy. A defined data strategy works to connect all your data, online and offline and defines the steps needed for advanced digital transformation. 

You’ll need to keep in mind, though, that tools or platforms don’t automatically make for an effective digital data strategy.

Some 70% of all digital transformation initiatives do not attain their intended goals, and close to $900 billion has been witnessed in potential wastage as a result of initiative failures.

So it’s not enough to simply say you’re going to implement a digital transformation. To yield results, you need a holistic transformation approach to identifying where the right digital tech is needed, fed with the right unified accessible data, accompanied by a clear data strategy. How could you possibly achieve this?

This is where customer data management could make a grand entrance. 

Customer Data Management, Benefits 

It is said, data is fuel for digital transformation initiatives. Superior customer data management, in particular, ensures the supply of that data fuel is enabled and activated. If your customer data is consistent, well managed, and directed to the right place, at scale and in real-time you have a better chance of achieving an all-around improved view of each customer. 

  • A single source of truth– Your organization likely has several different systems that store different data. Without effective customer data management across these tools, you’ll be required to enter data manually, which oftentimes leads to data capture inconsistency. A customer name might be entered in a system in the format “CAMERON LEE” and in another system as “LEE CAMERON” – which one is correct? This kind of transposition inconsistency and possible errors can lead to a lot of wasted time and a potentially poor customer experience, as you might end up sending multiple marketing emails to slightly different names, yet ultimately the same person. It is therefore important to converge on a single system model or a single source of truth where each customer data is managed centrally and shared or accessed by the surrounding systems. This ensures consistent, enriched, and up-to-date data information, no matter what system the customer data appears in. 
  • 360-degree view of each customer– Customer data management can help build a 360-degree view of key business information about the customer to allow you to take full advantage of your organization’s data, for better business outcomes that include; 

A compliant digital customer management strategy

Optimized and correctly calculated lifetime customer value

An improved and customized customer experience 

Improved customer onboarding and retention management

If you adopt customer master data management, your business is likely to do better, statistically, it has been found that digitally mature firms are 26% more profitable than their peers, they generate 9% more revenue, and achieve 12% higher market valuations than other large firms in their industries.

Getting ahead in terms of improving your relationship with your customers and dominating the markets in which you operate requires effective customer master data management. Having the pole position at the start of the race allows you to get ahead of competitors. With an ever-evolving digital world, you don’t want to delay your execution plans until later, the time has never been riper to evaluate what a CMDM can do for your business today!

Contact us for more information on the Pretectum CMDM solution.

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Master Data Management Business Requirements

Master Data Management is seen as a way for the business to address a number of technical and operational problems that may be strategic and tactical in nature.

Triggering events may be new business acquisitions and the wave of new data that may need to be incorporated in a robust de-duplicated way.

Another triggering event may be more rigorous operational scrutiny in response to new public regulations, changes from private to public accountability or compliance pressures.

Changes in organizational leadership accompanied by a revitalisation of the business vision and business strategy may also be a catalyst.

Whatever the cause, there is often a handful of expectations from the business as to what more data governance, influenced by the implementation of an MDM will deliver. With the customer master in particular there is often the belief that more rigorous deduplication, enhancement and data quality in the customer repository will help in improving the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) situation. The establishment of a “360-degree-view” of customer records is seen as a key to supporting KYC.

Software vendors see MDM in particular as a strong software systems-based approach to helping to formulate said views and addressing the needs of business pressures to improve data quality. These solutions focus on technical efficacy without an understanding or a desire to understand the organizational challenges that centralized control and governance of the data have for the day-to-day needs and operational requirements of the business itself.

Further, the approach of many of these solutions is often rooted in data practice theory and built on legacy technology stacks that are robust but aged, and somewhat incompatible with contemporary business-led as opposed to IT-led initiatives.

Expectations

  • The business should be able to define the terms and descriptions that it has for data elements that it uses. In some applications, this is referred to as a glossary but in reality, this is a collection of descriptions and data classifiers.
  • The business should be able to define the customer in a single way for all business areas to adhere to where the function is fully centralized. The business should be able to define what a customer record should look like in totality if this is required, especially if this is necessary for integration with systems.
  • The business should be able to use core elements of the defined customer with extensions by other areas of the business where the approach is looser or decentralized. Every business area may have a lens through which it chooses to see the customer, which may have supplementary attributes or simply a subset of all the elements that the systems require.
  • Data itself is created or collated centrally
  • The data is assessed in real-time and in batches as well as recurrent cycles for anomalies relative to the data definitions in place.
  • The data is identified for potential duplicates
  • the duplicates can be grouped, consolidated or merged via fully automated, semi-automated or manual methods, according to the needs of the business.
  • The data definitions can be leveraged by ecosystem applications and systems to ensure that records that are created or amended meet the configuration expectations of the MDM
  • The data itself is accessible to ecosystem applications and systems in a secure, authenticated and permission-based way through a syndication approach either in real-time, serially, batched/bulk or through continuous integration.
  • Data design creation and amendment can be established through decisions by a crowdsourced organizational hierarchy of stakeholders and interested parties who can approve/reject the designs.
  • Data creation and changes can, if necessary, also be established through a similar hierarchy of controllers, administrators, curators and stakeholders.
  • Where appropriate, the subjects of the data curation system can engage in a secure, authenticated self-service data curation approach to evaluate the data held and apply further curation.
  • Extensive secure and authenticated integrations are available for a wide array of technologies
  • Extensive reporting is available for compliance and operations on lineage, usage, statistics and data quality.

To learn how the Pretectum CMDM meets these expectations contact us for more information.