Tag: CRM

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Customer MDM and the accountant

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Applying data management best practices to the accounting function is one way to help provide some assurance that customer master data records are correct and up to date. A well-curated set of customer master data records will reduce errors, disputes and unauthorized discounts and risky credit lines.

Here are a couple of process activities in the accounting function that benefit from the good practice of master data governance using master data management.

Customer onboarding

The onboarding process is critical to new customer relationships. Setting up the customer master data correctly the first time with up-to-date contact data, billing and contracts or service information and valid Tax Identification Numbers or VAT/GST information is key to establishing and maintaining a useful customer master from an accounting perspective. Identifying the special credit terms, who is responsible for the relationship and holding data submission history and approval is essential. This is especially true if your accounting operations are automated or you’re trying to maintain a digital as opposed to paper-based record. Your MDM is not your system of record but critical pieces of the customer master can start their life in the MDM and then be syndicated to downstream systems like billing and accounting.

Periodic review

On a regular basis, there should be an inventory of the customer master data to ensure compliance and adherence to all necessary local and national permissions, tax and documentation requirements. Of particular importance is the contact information. This should all be correct and current. A periodic refresh of the customer master helps to avoid problems and keep the accounting operations function running most efficiently. If you have hundreds of contacts, in a year you may have a large number of accounts which need to be updated. This can be a daunting task if you don’t have up-to-date emails, phones and other contact address data for your customers, further, if your customer has passed away or has not engaged in a transaction with you for years, this can be an embarrassment if you send an update to them only every few years. Further, dormant accounts could be misappropriated and used for fraudulent activities.

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Reactivating the dormant customer account

It is good practice to change the status of customer accounts that look like they are no longer active. It might happen though that you decide at some point that a dormant account needs to be ‘woken-up’.

When dormant accounts are reactivated, it’s very important, just as with onboarding, to set up the customer master data for reactivated accounts correctly. This will be especially important if you have automated or semi-automated accounting processes that have been implemented since the customer account fell into disuse.

Data Refresh

The Pretectum CMDM enables you to refresh your systems and databases with cleansed and up-to-date master data for your customers. We recommend that you implement a strategy of regularized synchronization between your CRM, ERP or Accounting system with the Pretectum CMDM so that other business units can contribute to the quality of the accounting customer master and this arrangement can be reciprocated with the Pretectum CMDM as the syndication hub.

We consider regular synchronization to be a best practice. Synchronization shouldn’t be considered something that you only do occasionally, or when problems arise after the fact. Synching should be part and parcel of your accounting data management operation. Working with other stakeholders, the accounting team should employ best practices whenever they can to ensure the best possible data management approach.

If you would like to learn more about how you can benefit from customer MDM in your accounting practice please do reach out to us for more information.

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Managing customer data with CRM Solutions

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HubSpot’s 2021 State of Marketing report suggests that as much as a quarter of salespeople have never heard of or know anything about a customer relationship management system concept.

Many of those that do understand the concept of CRM itself, use manual methods, such as spreadsheets and email tools, for managing customer data. It is thought, that CRM applications can positively influence sales revenue by increasing business performance by almost a third, so you would think that picking and adopting a CRM solution would be a no-brainer as something your business might want to do.

Of course, that uplift in revenue makes many assumptions about the quality of the customer data you have in that CRM. CRM itself is a collection of practices and a holistic strategy for managing prospective and current customer relationships. The actual implementation of a CRM system or solution involves collecting and utilizing a number of critical pieces of data related to prospects and customers.

CRM solutions are designed to help with ensuring that the management of the customer data is efficient and effective in helping with the improvement of customer relationships, but a large part of this practice focuses on managing the relationship itself and not on the foundational piece of the customer digital entity itself.

You can consider the whole of a CRM solution as a kind of intelligent database built around relationship management but heavily focused on the transactional pieces of that relationship, the calls, emails, conversations etc. These in turn translate into leads, opportunities and actual sales or transactional events that bring the organization revenue, funding or revenue.

Why we care about the customer relationship

By reducing friction in customer interaction and personalizing the engagement the CRM tool helps businesses build stronger relationships between an organization and its external contacts and customers. Reduced engagement friction increases the likelihood of customer retention and long term customer lifetime value.

The brass ring of the engagement is one wherein the contact becomes a customer and a net promoter. A net promoter is someone who on the whole, will recommend your organization, its products, its services, to others.

When potential and current customers feel value and contentment with respect to your organization they will most probably not only buy your products and services but also refer your brand and details to their friends and family and others that they may meet in their own daily lives.

Who are the main users?

The content of a customer relationship management system is often used by many different interest groups in the business. Often the most interested party is sales but the content is of equal interest to those in marketing, support, service and accounting. For this reason, they all converge on needing to have the same basic understanding of the customer and the customer’s nuanced relationship with them and their role and function. This means that the customer master is often itself a hub with many spokes that lead to the systems and tools used by these other groups. Having the best possible master data that these groups can refer to in a unified way, is therefore foundational for having good customer relations.

To learn more about how the Pretectum C-MDM can help your business build the best possible customer master, reach out to us today, to learn more!

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Working the customer data master

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Acquired data comes with a myriad of potential issues. Whenever possible you want to originate your own data or at least have some understanding of the heritage of that data. This is particularly true when it comes to customer data.

Collecting customer data as the primary is largely considered an expensive exercise and one that not everyone can afford to engage in.

Owning your own data is by far and wide an advantage. Owning the sourcing and curation of customer master data, in particular, is something that with the Pretectum CMDM is now possible and in fact improved, even for organizations that have strong data traditions or no data collection heritage at all.

Irrespective of whether you have just a few thousand records or hundreds of millions, the approach is fundamentally the same.

Define the data, define the business rules, define the distribution and then incrementally build the data. cycle data through as many streams of finishing until you are happy with it and only then commit it to your master data repository.

Splice, merge, slice, and dice it into as many shapes and super and subsets as makes sense for the needs of the business.

TwinsUK is the UK’s largest adult twin registry and the most clinically detailed in the world. https://twinsuk.ac.uk/

When examining the data you have, or data that has been made available to you, you need to consider at least three key elements.

Meaning

What is the fundamental meaning or significance of this data to the organization? Is the data meant to serve as a single source of truth a golden record, an immutable reference that you will always point to as an external keyed identifier for the customer and definition?

Purpose

What do you have in mind for what you want to do with this data? Is the purpose of this data integration, selling, reselling, targeting, redistribution, marketing, finance and accounting, logistics, and health? What are the consequences of potentially duplicating or missing data in the customer records, who will it affect, and what costs might be incurred or benefits forfeited?

Fitness

The topic of data quality is a focus for all types of data held by the enterprise but the data that is stored in the customer master is of particular importance because the customer is a point of convergence for so many areas of organizational data processing.

In healthcare, having multiple copies of the same patient can make for ill-informed healthcare decisions as administrators and healthcare professionals struggle to take advantage of a unified patient profile and history. In the banking, insurance, and financial services sector it obscures the credit exposure and vested interest of the individual making it tough to assess the risk and value of a client. In the public sector, having a person defined more than once risks oversubscription to public and social benefits, under-reporting of repeat offenders, and over distributions of concessions or access.

In retail and anything that involves marketing, not only does it provide only partial views of customers, it also leads to confusion, transactional friction, and unnecessary additional costs, particularly in relation to communications.

With Pretectum CMDM you have complete control over not just the meaning, but also the purpose and fitness of your customer master data whether you created it, migrated it, or simply acquired it.

If you’re building data for CRM, ERP, CDP, or an EHR, Pretectum will be an indispensable help for you in support of any and all of these objectives. Why not consider a free trial?

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