Tag: SCV

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The key to an effective Customer MDM

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CRM, ERP and CDP do a great job of dealing with customer interaction, resource planning and marketing campaign execution but they are not necessarily great at managing the customer master.

So what is it, that you should expect from a good customer MDM? We have some Pretectum ideas and thought we would share them.

In our minds, a good MDM, whether it be for Customers, Materials, or Vendors or anything, should provide you with almost limitless design and function flexibility. This means that your solution should be able to deal with all manner of data at the customer level whether it be single or multi-dimensional and not of a fixed nature, or at least, be flexible enough that it can evolve over time.

When you consider your sales, marketing and service teams, in particular, they need to know more than just the name of the customers and their basic contact information.

Ideally, they need to know what other attributes like preferences, social contacts and potentially useful information can help them connect in a more meaningful way. If you have that information on hand somewhere, then you should have it in your MDM if it is relatively unchanging.

A successful MDM will be able to add intelligence and insights to the data where account management, service, support, marketing and accounting say, all need the data to deliver a connected experience. This means that the data is not necessarily exclusive to any single channel but can be Omni-channel in nature.

The data should be reliable, in as much as it shouldn’t be so changeable that your teams are confused about the truthfulness in the representation of the customer record. This means the solution needs to maintain a record that you can build atop.

This means no dependence on secondary Excel spreadsheets, spreadmarts, data lakes and sub-databases that contain external references and keys to your core record set, it also means that your teams don’t have to do a lot of pre and re-processing of the master which is susceptible to mistakes and can be error-prone.

Whatever you choose, it should be a unifying force for your many systems. According to Chiefmartec.com, Netskope revealed that the average enterprise uses 1,295 cloud services.

Number of Cloud Services Used by an Enterprise on Average in 2019

That’s an awful lot of systems. If you don’t have a unified way of threading them all together then you will land up with duplicates and a host of other issues with the data that these many systems will work with.

The Pretectum CMDM provides you with a way to define many schemas for the definition of a customer which can be derivations of an original source or a stored query.

In addition, you can adjust those stored queries to create alternative views of the original data. Combine this flexibility with the ability to syndicate the data to any and all groups within your business and then provide a uniquely identifying key for the customer record that doesn’t change over time and you have a persistent store of records that can be externally referenced by other systems using external keys.

Learn more about the Pretectum CMDM advantage.

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Coping with the Customer Master Data contradiction

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Talk to two different business users in two different departments and ask them what they think about the quality of the customer master and you might be surprised to hear that you hear two completely divergent views.

How does it happen, that two different people in two different departments using the same customer master data might have differing thoughts on the quality of the data? The answer might lie in the simple fact that for the two different groups, the needs and effectiveness of the data that is held might meet the purposes of one group but not another.

This dichotomy often stems from where the data originated, it may also stem from the different levels of rigour that the two different groups apply to the maintenance of the customer master. It could even be this way, because of the CRM, ERP, POS or CDP systems that are in use.

The order-to-cash process is pretty well understood in many circles as the process that involves a combination of sales operations, elements of logistics for fulfilment and the accounting function in the collection of the payment either at the time of order entry or through a post-delivery or at-time-of-delivery billing function.

In a nutshell, OTC is where your organization receives, processes, and completes customer orders. Most often it is used in reference to sales on credit. As a function used by a great many organizations, it is a crucial function for organizations that sell goods and services The effectiveness of the OTC cycle is often gauged by financial metrics and measures. These measures and metrics help businesses understand their sales performance and cash flow. Common measures are revenue volumes, margin contribution, personal performance, Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and bad debts.

Describing and elaborating on these aspects is beyond the scope of this piece but suffice to say that a great deal of these measures are bound up in the quality of the customer master data that your business has on hand and leverages in the sales order cycle.

An important thing to also remember is that many companies fail to recognize the correlation between the quality of their customer data and the health of their cash flow.

Tracking and analyzing customer master data helps manage the whole length of sales cycles and provides insights into opportunities for optimization that should be explored further.

Customer master data issues in the OTC are probably considered most critical in the B2B sector but unfortunately, customer data quality-related issues are pervasive across all sectors and B2C suffers some of the exact same challenges as B2B.

Here are some elements of the data quality that are worth considering as a part of the OTC cycle.

Data fit for purpose

Even If the customer master data record is adequate for issuing an invoice or receiving payments, the customer master data record could nonetheless be incomplete or incorrect for the purposes of other departments like logistics, service, support or marketing. Since invoicing and payment processing typically occurs only periodically, and in some cases maybe even only once a year (annual subscription); there’s a risk that the rest of the organization could encounter a data problem at any time.

This is particularly prevalent if the customer audiences are regularly changing their contact details or if the needs of the business are expanding and require the build-out of more data to better serve the customer. Early customer data acquisitions may fall far short of immediate needs and now there is a mad frenzy underway to work out how to fill in the blanks.

Refining the message

Marketing’s automation of routine tasks is essential for organizations to remain ahead of competitors and remain relevant to audiences. Data is required to drive those automation. For the automation to be effective, the data needs to be of great quality and sufficient detail that the messages can be appropriately personalized. If the data is incorrect, inadequate or missing, marketing’s automation efforts will fail to hit the mark.

By using customer master data effectively marketing teams can make a difference at the top of the funnel. Conversations between analysts, MessageGears, and business leaders reveal that 90% of business leaders feel that digital messaging mechanisms like emails, mobile phone messages and messages through other platforms like Facebook and Whatsapp are extremely important when compared with other marketing activities, principally because they can be customized.

What next?

Given these challenges in perspective, in particular, it is important to therefore work out how to resolve the gaps in data quality and missing data or fragmented data that are needed by the rest of the business.

Regardless of their size, companies often recognise poor quality data issues, but they don’t necessarily understand how they can improve the situation. In fact, in 2017, Gartner stated that the average financial impact of poor data on companies was around $15 million per year, several years on, we can expect that that number has grown. Adopting a customer master data management program helps minimize the disconnect between the needs of departments and the effective improvement of customer master data quality.

Pretectum’s approach to helping in this area is with a cloud-based customer master data management platform that allows different parts of the business to hold records of customers that align with specific functional needs but at the same time service the wider needs of the larger business. Only through the democratization of the customer master records is it possible for cross-functional departments to recognise, identify and leverage the best possible customer master data records to drive business opportunities and effectiveness in the communications, service and support of the customer.

The Pretectum CMDM platform allows the users of the system to retain their own distinctive data without contaminating or compromising the data of other groups, but at the same time allows them to share a common understanding of the customer, a single customer view if you will. This approach can be adopted in a decoupled or tightly integrated way with existing systems of record through integration.

Inaccurate or incomplete data means that teams spend more time researching and confirming contact information than actually engaging in higher-value work like selling, servicing or supporting customers. Today your teams could be spending as much as a third of their time negotiating with bad data rather than with customers and prospects.

Contact us today to learn more about how the Pretectum CMDM could be of benefit to your business.

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In pursuit of a Single Customer View

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You might have heard of the terms, Single customer view (SCV) or Golden Customer Record, 360 ° view of the customer, or the Customer Data 360. In themselves, they could potentially be referring to the same thing but you’ll find that vendors of software platforms all have slightly different views of what these terms mean and in the end, you have to decide what is necessary and most appropriate to the needs of your specific business. What is the problem that you’re looking to solve, with any Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) platform?

The Pretectum CMDM platform focuses principally on the Business-to-Consumer (B2C) space servicing industries such as health, property, telco, travel, financial services, retail, and insurance. For these types of customers, there are some very specific challenges that need to be addressed.

For these industries understanding the differences between customer records and recognizing that the same name and vital statistics could exist in ones’ systems for essentially different people even at the same address. These industry segments not only have a critical dependency on ensuring that they don’t have duplicates, but that the information that they do hold, is the best it possibly can be in order to meet regulatory compliance requirements, maximize service efficacy, optimize support and engage in suitable care and diligence when dealing with consumers.

Having a complete, correct, and appropriate repository that describes the customer is essential in the execution of cost-optimal activities and gives customers a superior level of confidence and comfort in their dealings with the business. Basic data, when augmented with enrichment datasets or data that is specifically pertinent to the relationship with the customer enables the business to provide a more personalized and intimate engagement relationship that supports better insights, more targeted messaging, and personalization.

Very few organizations successfully implement the concept of an SCV when they depend on their core data repositories that are focused principally on transaction processing. The reason for this is that the transactional system is often dealing with only a subset of data elements in contrast to all the data elements that the business has and potentially cares about.

As a consequence, customer service personnel in particular, only see a sliver of information that relates to customer service and support handling, and often this information is either outdated or inadequate relative to the needs of an optimal customer conversation. While privacy concerns or cost may hold a business back from creating tight integrations between their many platforms, the reality is that a Customer MDM (CMDM) can be of assistance in bridging the gap between silos of similar data records while still maintaining appropriate privacy and allowing due care and diligence among personnel to be applied in service of an ideal customer experience with the least amount of risk.

Great expectations

Customers expect there to be the potential for 24×7 support across multiple channels and touchpoints with consistency. That consistent experience is only possible with a centralized single source of truth that is being continuously maintained with the best possible descriptors of the customer. Customers also expect to be able to engage with businesses using the many channels of communication and engagement without having to repeatedly provide essential information that relates to them. They expect that journey to be tracked in the customer interaction platforms using the latest and current descriptions of them as customers.

The insurance industry has been struggling to move from risk-based product focus to customer focus. Also, with mergers and acquisitions and a proliferation of products, insurers have a difficult battle to win over customers selling products that are intangible with benefits that are realised in future years, if at all.

Customer MDMs are not meant to carry transactional logs of customer engagement, CIC, CRM, ERP, Service Desk, or Customer Data Platforms (CDP) are perhaps more appropriate for event entries. But, CMDM can carry key identifiers that describe the most recent interactions with a customer that can accelerate clarity on the engagement. A CMDM could, for example, track the ID of the last customer interaction ID, the last date of the interaction, and the last customer service person that they spoke to. This same system could also hold details of the last time the customer exchanged value with the business, the value of that exchange, and the medium or circumstances under which the exchange took place.

How a business chooses to create and maintain those linkages should be an aspect of flexibility that data owners should expect from their Customer Master Data Management platform.

A unified view of the customer is a starting point for sweeping digital transformation and holds the potential as a springboard for omni-channel customer experience initiatives. For that to happen, the adoption of a Customer MDM has to be recognized as a fundamental building block and it needs to be put in place.

The SCV or however you want to describe your centrally mastered customer data should provide a central store of the one version of the truth of the key information assets. It has the ability to bring structure and internal confidence to a critical repository of business data that in the long term represents a data asset for the organization. This same repository stands as a virtual representation of business reputation and the customer relationship.

These key attributes of a Customer Master become ever-increasingly important as businesses strive to differentiate themselves from their competitors and move ever closer to their customers in order to maintain loyalty and sustain an elevated customer lifetime value.