Building a business case for customer data transparency starts with a conversation with your stakeholders

Managing your customer data with a master data management (MDM) platform can add value to your business.

You know this because you’ve seen that trusted sources of customer data can help you reduce the cost of application integration, improve customer experience and get more actionable insight from your analytics.

How to personalise insurance solutions with master data management (MDM)

As an insurance professional responsible for developing, managing or selling insurance products, have you ever dreamt of being able to offer a perfectly tailored and personalised insurance solution to your customer? A solution so unique that none of your competitors can match it?

Even though CPG companies and other businesses are in the middle of the busiest time of the year, Thanksgiving and holidays provides us an opportunity to take a moment to be grateful for our companies, colleagues and wonderful customers. But what often gets ignored in this time of gratitude is the richness and value of the data that customers are sharing about the product and their purchase experiences.

Consumers are increasingly making purchase decisions with their hearts AND minds. By properly managing customer data to support transparency, retailers can win favor on both fronts.

Being an MDM manager certainly means being in demand and at the center of attention. The reason is as simple as it is awe-inspiring: as an MDM manager, you’re leading the charge for providing high-quality data, developing the master data strategy and overseeing system acquisitions and integrations. You collaborate with a variety of stakeholders – planners, program managers, product developers, marketing professionals, supply chain managers, senior management and executives. If your organization has a chief data officer (CDO), it’s likely your work contributes to the decisions that person is making.

If you’re like most organizations, chances are you are struggling to understand the connections found in your disparate silos of information. We live in a virtual, technologically advanced world, and the reliance on technology by both companies and their customers for conducting day-to-day transactions and interactions only continues to increase. The number of systems holding this critical data is vast and fragmented, each operating independently of one another. The challenge of identifying and reconciling data across these disparate and siloed systems makes creating a complete and accurate view of a company or customer almost impossible. This is because no single system contains this view across all departments or lines of business or is designed to manage the complete lifecycle of the data.

In my previous post, I discussed the next evolution of CRM, which involves using master data management (MDM) as the foundation to provide a comprehensive understanding of your target audiences. I covered data issues present in many CRMs today, including missing, antiquated and inaccurate data, and how MDM can help overcome them. In this post, I reveal the many ways complete, unified customer data improves business outcomes and delivers value to organizations and customers alike. 

“The purpose of a business is to create a customer.” - Peter Drucker

Every day, businesses around the world deploy customer relationship management (CRM) in the hopes of selling faster and smarter, building engaging experiences, delivering personalized messages and more. Gartner estimated CRM software revenue reached $39.5 billion in 2017, overtaking database management systems revenue to become the largest software market globally. 

As a marketing manager with the responsibility of qualifying leads and serving users with relevant content, CRM is your most valuable tool.

Of all customer data systems, your CRM should contain the most fine-grained view of your customers. There are some caveats, though. In order to address customers and users in the most relevant and personalized way, it's crucial to keep the data clean and trustworthy.

A colleague recently bought a new car. He was thrilled and anxious to have it delivered within a couple of weeks. Not long after delivery, he received an email from the car manufacturer, featuring a promotion for the exact same car, only at a drastically reduced price.

Within a matter of seconds, the manufacturer had turned my colleague from a brand advocate to a dissatisfied customer.