Tag: ERP

To run a customer marketing campaign or undertake any customer analytics, you might consider a variety of customer-related data at your disposal.

There are several types of customer data that you might consider but what we will focus on here is how you can consider the incorporation of aggregates into your customer master to help influence and inform your decisions and actions as a business.

Transactions

Transactions are easily understood. They occur every time there is a value exchange between your business and the customers. Every additional transaction deepens the relationship that your business has with the customer and likely also influences if they will be a customer again. While you may have a particular interest in the tastes and preferences of the customer. At the aggregate level, it is useful to know how many times the customer has transacted with you, the average value of each interaction and the frequency between transactions. By having these attributes tied to the individual customer master you can calculate the lifetime value of that customer, perhaps infer something about their preferences and how they might respond to certain events or promotions. Your CDP or eCommerce platform may have this information but would this be of value to other areas of your business?

Service and Support

If you sell products that are often associated with a service element then, this is an aspect that can likely also be easily understood.

Every time the customer engages with a representative of your organization around a service or support element associated with the goods and services you provide can inform your business about the levels of the relationship that exists between the customer and your business and its goods and services.

Some sort of survey assessment at the conclusion of every interaction can also tell you whether this customer is a net promoter or detractor of your business. This information could be useful in your next engagement or outreach event associated with that customer. Insight into contacts can help to convey a closer understanding and form a stronger bond between your business and the customer. Consider how you could incorporate survey, support ticket, warranty and other aggregated information into the customer master

Social media

Your CDP platform likely contains some understanding of the social media aspects of your customers but it is likely that there is nothing on the CRM or ERP system. If you collect social media data you may be able to see which platform is the most popular among your customer base. You could consider this in influencing your marketing campaigns and also decide what type of social media platforms and posts perform best and what time of day. Using social media information can influence what you create and publish for maximum reach. Social media is a critical avenue for certain types of brands, and is now less of an area of exploration and testing, and more a necessary line item within the marketing plans for brands.

The Pretectum CMDM can be configured by you to take the aggregations from these other sources and incorporate them into your Customer master ready for syndication to whoever needs the data.

To learn more, about the Pretectum CMDM advantage contact us for more info.

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.

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.