Tag: Compliance

Posted on

Building your Customer Data supply chains

Customer Data is a critical asset for every business. But what if you could get better customer data? In this blog post, we discuss how enterprises can start building their customer data supply chains ahead of the implementation of a Pretectum CMDM.

The first step is establishing management responsibilities.

As a first step, the chief data officer or data product manager should name a “customer data supply chain manager” from their staff to coordinate the effort and recruit “responsible parties” from each department (including external data sources) across the customer data supply chain.

The next step is to put issues associated with data consolidation and ownership front and center. You’ll find that most issues melt away, as few departments wish to take a hard stance in the face of regulatory compliance and regulatory matters.

Data supply chains are a way to help you understand where your data comes from and how it’s used. They can also help you create a stronger relationship with the people who make sure that your data is clean and correct.

the customer data supply chain manager’s job would also be to create an audit trail of what happens with customer data at each step along the way so that questions about provenance can be answered quickly without having to engage in the laborious track down that often comes from an issue that arises later on!

Tools that provide collaboration workflow and decisions can help with this.

Identifying candidate use cases.

Customer master data has a wide array of potential use cases for which having access to more or improved data would bring value.

These should be elaborated and prioritized based on anticipated value and anticipated or projected difficulty to implement.

Poor data quality can hurt even the best business use cases, so it is crucial that organizations focus on ensuring that the right methods and people are in control of improving overall quality before they begin executing in support of any use cases.

Mapping out customer data supply chains.

Ideally, each data responsible department involved in the project would have a point person assigned to the effort who will identify all active data flows out of and into their group.

In finance, this might be the gathering of credit information or billing data. In sales, this might be tied to the demographic or economic status of the customer or prospect.

In marketing, this might be a great many characteristics including household characteristics, education, socio-economic status, and other campaign-bound traits.

The compliance and risk team may have different needs and expectations altogether.

Each group will need to identify potential or actual quality issues that may exist—and any new ones that might need to be added as part of this initiative.

Identify the highest-quality sources.

This step is perhaps the most important one on your journey toward building a robust customer data supply chain because it allows you to prioritize which data needs are most pressing or likely to go unmet if addressed last.

In other words, it helps you figure out where you want to start first so that you don’t waste time on things that aren’t high priorities but could become critical down the road given what we know about how business works today.

It’s not enough just for someone somewhere at some point in time saying “yes, I agree!”—that’s what happens when an executive agrees verbally with something but doesn’t put it into writing anywhere else besides their own memory banks!

Final thoughts

Customer data supply chain management is a great way to ensure that your organization collects and shares the customer data it needs to succeed.

It can also help you improve your overall quality by identifying and addressing issues at their source, rather than after the fact.

To get started, identify those parties responsible for sharing data up or downstream from your group.

Prioritize use cases based on anticipated value and difficulty of implementation.

Map out each department’s active data flows—along with any identified quality issues—and add new ones as needed.

Finally, assign point people within each department who will identify all active data flows out of and into their group—along with any identified quality issues that may exist—and any new ones to add as part of your Customer MDM initiative.

Posted on

Customer Data Management is at the core of Customer Data Governance

skyscrapers with reflecting walls in modern megapolis

There will be very few organizations that don’t have customers as part of their overall data landscape. For those who think that customer data is not that important, it is likely that they are either in a segment where they have tight integration with their customer(s) or where they actually think of customers as something else.

Several industries often ignore the importance of the customer. This in itself either presents or has started to present issues for those sectors with consumers in particular now having much more choices. Among them, are healthcare, banking, legal, telecoms, and insurance.

According to Hubspot, the expectations for better customer service experiences are increasing with almost all customer service professionals agreeing that customers today have higher expectations than ever before. It is so focal that many companies now formally track customer satisfaction (CSAT), review sites and even engage in NPS surveys

Deloitte offers up the perspective that “Contrary to conventional wisdom, there’s been no fundamental rewiring of the consumer. The modern consumer is a construct of growing economic pressure and increasing competitive options.” This perspective was already viewed as true ahead of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the time of the article, Deloitte had already concluded a year-long study to go beyond the proverbial news headlines to establish more profound observations about consumers than the media hype was suggesting.

One of the big shakeups for retail, in particular, has been the emergence of increased D2C.

D2C, an acronym for Direct-to-consumer or Direct2Consumer, is a type of business-to-consumer (B2C) retail sales strategy that has existed for a long time. Factory outlets might come to mind, but in reality, it is so much more.

D2C is a commercial model where a business will build, market, sell and ship products directly to customers. For manufacturers who previously only engaged in B2B where they were selling wholesale to commercial retailers, this means that they have spawned new retail channels which in some instances involved running eCommerce or eShop sites and gathering and maintaining consumer data.

Flipping the narrative

When one considers data governance, it is framed as typically a collection of processes, people assignments (roles), policies, standards, tools and metrics that describe the management processes for data.

When you consider this in the context of the customer master, this is typically focused on the internal standards and data collection and handling policies that might explicitly describe how data is gathered, stored, processed, and disposed of.

More data governance principle-based considerations are around customer master data availability, usability, integrity and security. In the end, the most important aspects are knowing where your data is, how it’s being utilized, and whether or not it’s adequately protected. A comprehensive approach to data governance would provide assurances on the effective and efficient use of customer information.

Master data management (MDM) as a practice, includes processes from the request for the creation of master data all the way through to retirement or disposal. Customer master data management (CMDM) sits as a sub-element within the MDM practice and is governed by the data governance program.

An optimal data governance program “creates the rules and adjudication of the operational processes that are executed within those processes. Therefore, Data Governance does not sit as a separate process” according to Frank Cerwin, President and Managing Principal of Data Mastery Inc and quoted in a Dataversity piece on this very topic.

This is Pretectum’s view on the approach also and it is one of the reasons that the Pretectum approach to CMDM has you start with the definition of the customer through schema definition, the assignment of roles and access via technical objects.

Contact us to learn more about how Pretectum can help with your customer data governance initiative.

Posted on

Transforming gas, electric and water utilities

cable current danger distribution

For utility providers to remain competitive and stable in a climate of continuing economic uncertainty accompanied by somewhat unpredictable regulatory change, gas, electric and water utilities must improve the way that they think about and use customer data.

Top of mind for many in the utility sector will be the need to accelerate the replacement of rigid and geriatric customer information systems (CIS). To remain relevant to consumers they need to add new capabilities that enhance the customer service experience and enable consistent, successful up-sell and cross-sell capability.

At the centre of the CIS is the customer record, connected to one or more accounts and a plethora of supporting transactional systems that embrace everything from IoT to outbound communication like marketing and billing.

While the account is heavily dependent on the metering systems, many of which are IoT-enabled, the reality is that the customer master is not so dependent. The customer master in particular, with its potential for a multi-account relationship, is more important from credit risk, service delivery, optimization and discounting perspective.

Consumers are cost conscious and they expect the utility provider to understand the whole relationship that they have with them. Accordingly, they want account managers and customer service personnel to recognise that even as consumers they have a multi-faceted relationship with the provider.

If you’re responsible for customer data management for a utility provider then consider how you deal with multi-site consumer customers and how you maximize the experience and minimize the risk.

Pike Research, a unit of Navigant’s Energy Practice, projects that transformational initiatives fuel growth in the electric utility billing alone and CIS software and services market, and that has led to expenditures in excess of $5Bn.

The utility sector has historically been encumbered with legacy systems that barely evolve, and are hard to implement and change. These systems are also expensive to maintain. Though IoT is changing things, one residual of legacy is that a great deal of the data exchange between smart meters, billing systems and the like, is undertaken in batch mode rather than in real-time. There is also often compartmentalization of business functions that actually hampers a holistic approach to dealing with customers resulting in an overall poor experience. This in turn leads to a higher cost to serve.

Consider what your goals might be for improving the situation with customer master data management as a utility provider, and consider too what the benefits are that a unified API-enabled search, retrieve, edit and update capability for the customer master might bring. They could be any or all of the following:

  • Improved Reporting
  • Improved data privacy and regulatory compliance
  • Improved customer retention
  • Improved customer acquisition
  • Increased upsell and cross-sell
  • Real time insights
  • Real-time customer account self-service
  • Easier integration
  • An improved system and process support
  • Reduced risk

Pretectum’s CMDM is a customer master data management system that allows your utility organization to bring data from disparate sources and consolidate views of the data in those disparate sources into a single unified platform where you can curate customer records, create relationships between the data silos and zone in on a golden nominal customer record with cross references.

As a single source of truth related to the essential data that defines the customer, the Pretectum CMDM can be used as a hub for the many spokes of your utility organization, serving the needs of Marketing, Sales, Risk and Compliance, Accounting and Billing and Service and Support. Contact us today to learn how we can help.