Tag: Single Customer View

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Customer Data Platform vs Customer Data Management debate: both gets challenged by CMDM

In the debate between Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Customer Data Management (CMDM), both face challenges, but CMDM emerges as a noteworthy alternative. CMDM addresses concerns related to customer data unification and management, offering a comprehensive solution that can overcome the limitations of both CDPs and traditional Customer Data Platforms.

In today’s marketing landscape, achieving a comprehensive understanding of customers is often referred to by vendors as the Customer Single View (CSV), we call it the Single Customer View (SCV) but you get the idea.

The SCV is a shared aspiration among marketers. While commonly explored avenues include Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) and Data Management Platforms (DMPs), as well as traditional Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, an emerging alternative to consider is Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) Solutions.

Distinguishing between a CDP and a DMP reveals that DMPs historically operated with anonymous cookies, initially designed for online ad networks and lacking the capability to store Personally Identifiable Information (PII). In contrast, CDPs seamlessly handle both known and unknown individuals, storing essential PII such as names, addresses, email IDs, and mobile numbers.

CDPs excel in capturing, integrating, and managing diverse customer data from various channels, including CRM, Customer Service, Loyalty programs, Websites, Mobile Apps, and Social Media. This holistic approach results in the creation of a singular, comprehensive customer record often referred to by vendors as the ‘golden record‘ or again, as we sometimes call it, a golden nominal.

The imperative for achieving an SCV arises from its potential benefits, including enhanced personalization, actionable insights, cross-channel measurement, customized offers, loyalty programs, and efficient customer service. However, the challenge lies in data stored in legacy systems and the prevalence of multiple customer data instances, even within a single platform.

Achieving a precise SCV requires that you connect all customer records, necessitating strategies like algorithmic matching, cross-reference tables, deduplication and shared identifiers.

Embracing any customer data platform including a CMDM like the Pretectum CMDM as an alternative solution yields several advantages, including the delivery of a sharper customer profile, improved support for predictive modelling, real-time updates, synchronized customer experiences across channels, integration of dark and unstructured data, efficiency gains, and reduced dependence on IT.

Nevertheless, it is crucial to recognize that these tools are simply enablers and their successful implementation and operation require intelligent frameworks and experienced partners who view challenges through a business lens. Organizations evaluating MarTech tools must address key questions such as the end objective, data accessibility, stakeholder alignment, and resource commitment.

Moving forward, considerations for an effective platform involve evaluating the relevance of data collection methods for business and engagement channels, ensuring continuous access to all data, enhancing knowledge about customers, and seamless integrations for insight-driven actions.

The decision-making process remains ongoing, with organizations needing to choose solutions that align best with their business needs.

The critical factor in this journey is management ownership, where solutions of this nature thrive when led at the management level, addressing business silos and data turf wars within large companies.

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Customer Master Data Management matters

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Some reasons why you should care

1 Reducing business friction – when you don’t have a customer MDM, every business department is responsible for collecting and maintaining master data – marketing, sales, service, support, billing and collections.

The result is that the same master data may be collected multiple times, and worse, the exact same data may be maintained by more than one department.

If it is consumer data that may land your business in a non-compliance situation when dealing with GDPR and privacy laws. 

A customer MDM defines a clear governance process; this means every aspect of the customer master needs to be collected only once. this reduces the number of collection points for the master data and in turn, can reduce the workload for customer data collection for each department. There is less time collecting and verifying and less time needing to be spent on reconciliation.

2 Having a customer MDM will lead to improved customer data quality. One of the main weaknesses in an unstructured, decentralized data management function is that data quality gets compromised.

Every department holds a version of the truth as they see it. This inevitably leads to reconciliation and consolidation problems and can even introduce issues in the transaction processing process for the customer.

Sales sell, but the credit risk department assesses risk and sets credit thresholds. If the two departments are working off different views of the customer because the customer master is out of synch or never gets reconciled then sales may not sell because they suspect that the customer is not current with their payments or they may oversell to a customer who has a poor likelihood of settlement. A unified customer master that both references will give a better view of the customer.

When the Customer MDM is the one single source of truth it will provide all relevant master data and directly deliver all the benefits of superior data quality. Data quality here isn’t only about the correct data but also the customer data that is the most up-to-date.

The best possible customer record and experience for all, is the result.

3 When all the customer master data is located centrally, the organization is placed in a better position for compliance and governance assessment. The Customer MDM provides the ability to clearly structure data responsibilities.

This structure tells you who is responsible for definition, creation, amendment, viewing/retrieving, deletion and archiving. Moreover, when the data is found centrally, when there are subject access requests, you only have to go to one place to provide details of what you have and what you know about the customer.

Having the customer MDM as your single source of truth will assist in meeting all the expectations of audit, risk, compliance and the customer themselves. Master data management systems in general represent perfect single-source of truth repositories in that they often provide evidence of origin and sourcing lineage. These exist to support business processes but can also be valuable for compliance reporting. S

4 Make better decisions now that you have all your customer data in one place and can have a comprehensive, and complete view of the customer master. Organization-wide decision processes can rely on the latest set of common customer master data which will help operations, executives, managers and marketers make informed, fact-based decisions.

Actually, this is a very important aspect you have to understand. When it comes to decision making, dynamic data is most often in the spotlight. However, as mentioned in my initial statement, master data is actually the powerhouse that drives your dynamic data.

5 Automation doesn’t have to be a dirty people-displacing word. In fact, it can be a boon to your business efficiency and effectiveness since data exchanges and data hygiene tasks can be performed automatically.

For most companies, the implementation of a customer MDM will eliminate a lot of highly manual tasks engaged in by multiple participants in the creation and maintenance of customer master data.

You can still collect data in Excel if necessary but as long as those spreadsheets land in the master data system through an automated method, you will still have what you consider a tactically effective mechanism as something complementary to the overall needs that the business

Your centralized, system-based Customer Master Data Management eliminates many operational and logistics issues.

With the Pretectum CMDM, there’s no longer a need for creating and maintaining personal Excel files and isolated databases of customer data. Instead, data governance processes restrict that approach and since people always want the most complete and freshest data, why wouldn’t they go to a system that has all that?

To learn more, contact us, and learn more about our customer master data management solution,