Do you know what your customers purchased from your company last month?
Can you predict what they will purchase next month?
If you have some difficulty in answering these questions, your company may be missing out on additional opportunities. Most companies witness an uplift in transactional conversion rates from customization of the user experience. Customers want, and expect, a customized and relevant experience when working with your company, and whether or not you can deliver this depends on how much your company knows about them.
The extent to which your company knows your customers depends on the content and quality of your customer MDM. Customizing the customer experience becomes difficult if the data you would use, lives in many disconnected systems and departments that do not or cannot interact with each other directly. A customer-centric element of master data management, customer MDM is the focal point of driving new business opportunities by allowing companies to find, merge, and link customer data across the organization.
Customer MDM makes it easy to link and integrate systems like CRM and ERP and provide a single, centralized view of your customers in a holistic way. Companies that understand the substantial benefits of connecting the data they hold in the master data management platform can understand the business value that could be attained from appropriately wide access to customer data. Customer master data management tools can assist in harnessing and boosting CRM functions like sales, marketing, customer service, and e-commerce.
The CRM leaders who avoid customer master data management land up with flawed results that could upset customers. An integrated CRM strategy enabled by customer master data management links the entire customer journey from sales and marketing to customer service and ecommerce to provide you with a 100% overview of customer history and communication.
To have a holistic customer data view, you need to integrate operational master data for every customer. The data must then be cleansed, verified for duplicates, and maintained. Automating this process through data quality operations that match and connect the data, provides you with a set of correct and reliable records.
Marketing teams run campaigns with a better chance of success by targeting contacts on a more personal and relevant level. Sales teams generates offers and promotions based on historical engagement, delivering better predictability of response and outcomes.
Customer MDM makes it all possible by providing a single point of entry for customer data accessible enterprise-wide. This can improve the customer experience by reducing the time your service teams spend finding customer records and digging into customer problems.
A broad view of your company’s customer data makes the segmentation process simple and more accurate, as you have insights gained from their integrated historical behavior and purchasing patterns. You gain a comprehensive understanding of how your customers are expected to act, enabling you to generate products and services that they actually want and increase the likelihood of them purchasing from you.
As you get a complete and holistic overview of customer activity across your company, customer interaction patterns may begin to surface. Eventually, companies can appropriately cross-sell and up-sell more products and services by providing incentives based on previous patterns. Most consumers appreciate emails from retailers suggesting promotions, products and services aligned with past behaviour.
Companies can create new products and develop more targeted marketing campaigns based on what they currently know about their customers’ behaviour. And, of course, they have the insights to deliver a lot more customized service to individuals with centralized offers and promotions. Companies can identify customers who may start looking elsewhere and hopefully retain them by offering customized incentives to stay with you.
Taking a customer-centric approach to master data creation and service delivery enables your organization to fulfil the actual needs of your customers and add value. Consider the sources of insight and how you can leverage these to best effect.