Improve Customer Relationships With A Master Data Management

Master Data Management (MDM) is a critical success factor in building optimal customer relationship management processes. Companies that do not supplement their CRM systems with MDM have a high potential for erroneous results that will end up deteriorating customer relationships, which can mean a reduction in potential revenue of up to 25 percent.

CRM leaders must understand the benefits that MDM brings to improving customer relationships and must make MDM part of their CRM strategy. MDM is critical in enabling these CRM leaders to create the 360-degree view of the customer required for an optimized customer experience.

Organizations are moving towards a more integrated CRM approach that focuses on the customer experience with better interaction, through marketing, sales, customer service, e-commerce, and all other customer-facing channels. This approach requires an understanding of all customer relationships and interactions with the company.

This single or 360-degree view of the customer requires that all operational master data belonging to the customer be combined from all the data silos where it currently resides. This data is then checked and cleaned for duplicates while selecting the highest quality values ​​across all data sources for each master data attribute. The result is a single version of the truth for the master data.

Big Data and MDM to improve customer relationships

MDM also offers advantages to CRM leaders to effectively use big data sources such as social media. Organizations have routinely used business information providers for such things as segmentation, customer acquisition, and prospecting. However, in the past, this use occurred more frequently within a silo with a single system or a business function, such as marketing or sales, with no possibility of coordinated reuse in the rest of the organization. Now companies are using social data to try to understand customer behavior and feelings.

And they do it together, for areas such as customer segmentation or problem-solving, or individually to personalize campaigns and offers.

As interest in the corporate use of big data grows, problems are emerging with low-quality master data. Without MDM, trying to identify a customer results in the same inaccuracy problems as those used by information providers, with fragmented master data.

Main characteristics of an MDM providing 360º vision

• Discover the hidden value in your data. By linking data, non-obvious relationships can be inferred from internal and external big data sources for a complete 360-degree view. In this way, a holistic view is provided by connecting the dots to predict future customer needs.
• Visual exploration of data relationships. An MDM with the ability to visually represent data relationships is able to reveal opportunities to improve results at all stages of a customer’s life. It offers intuitive ways to interact with customers, suppliers, products, and other internal and external data. You get the ability to look at a customer’s profile and see underlying associations that can predict the next best action.
• Improve big data analysis. MDM connects master data with new types of data, such as transactions, interactions, and the Internet of Things. It provides context, which is an absolute must to ensure companies gain insight into customer intent so they can act on it. Improves the quality of big data analysis by eliminating inconsistencies and duplicate information. And validate data, enrich profiles, and organize relationships so organizations can transform big data from mere potentials into powerful initiatives.
• Optimize big data management. With Master Data Management you get answers faster by combining scalability and performance. Provides fast results by processing billions of records in hours instead of days. It improves employee efficiency and enables business users to provide accurate insights from new data sources that were previously not mastered.