Author: Miles Jones

Customer Service is driven by data

You might have heard or read about the concept of Net Promoter Scoring or NPS. At its heart, NPS, as a measure, is used to calculate the status of sentiment within a customer in relation to a product, service, brand, or experience. When looked at in aggregate it is the percentage of customers who are effectively pro or positively disposed toward that thing as opposed to against, or negatively disposed detractors of that good, service, brand, or experience.

If you recognize and acknowledge that surveys are a good way to get a sense of customer sentiment then it makes sense to go to the next step of attaching that sentiment to the customer master itself. This also can help guide service and support personnel in understanding that in some instances a particular customer has already indicated some sort of unhappiness and may need some specific special handling, Now that’s what we call customized or personalized customer interaction!

Using Pretectum APIs to manage and access the customer master, you can hook the survey results on a per-response basis right back into the customer master and surface elements like the date the last survey was undertaken the NPS, and any other data that you feel might be important. Ultimately the choice of what you store when you store it and the frequency with which you store it, is entirely up to you and the needs of your business.

How CMDM plays into “defensive” data management

Some of the more rigorous compliance expectations that your business should be adhering to, under the various regulations, include lawful possession of data, fairness in the use of that data, and transparency about the data that you have. Some other requirements are that you only use the data for its originally agreed purpose, that you only hold the absolute minimum of data that you need, that you retain it only for so long as you previously agreed or until the data no longer serves its original purpose, that the data be correct and proper and not exposed publicly and that if any of these facets are not adhered to, that the persons to whom that data relates, will be appropriately informed.

The fines and penalties associated with violations and failures can be extremely punitive and actually put organizations out of business.

The Pretectum Customer Master Data Management platform addresses aspects of this defensive strategy by offering five key characteristics to the customer master data management practice that support your CMDM function in being compliant.

Encryption – all data stored in the Pretectum CMDM platform and as such, data at rest, is encrypted by default in a secure database

Access Control – all access to objects within the Pretectum CMDM platform is granted through a “least permissions” model and is granted to users via an identifier with an accompanying password for UI access, and the same with a token via API. Users are then further restricted based on a hierarchy of permissions based on the organizational assignment and very fine-grained permissions within that organizational assignment.

Identifiable users – all users are identified by way of an email address that is part of the domain associated with the Pretectum platform subscription.

Data Quality built-in – depending on the way schemas are defined, all data either confirms or conflicts with self-defined business rules and configuration. The ability to observe the compliance of a given record with the specific rules defined, is observable at every stage in the platform.

Verbose Auditing and change logging – a verbose history of changes and events is tracked for all data and all objects in the platform including changes to user permissions and access.

Does Life Imitate Art or does Art Imitate Life?

Although the Pretectum platform is focused purely on Customer MDM, it affords your business the ability to define any number of critical key traits that your business might care to digitally imitate, about your customers. This means that if your model of engagement is highly personalized, with high touch and direct engagement by your associates, you need to empower those associates with as much suitable information as possible in order to service those customers optimally.

Building and defining your brand

Your marketing team, your founders, the industry analysts, and of course your share and stockholders likely view your organizational brand as one of the most valued assets your business has.

That’s assuming you have a brand that is easily identifiable and discernable from the rest of the pack.

When your customers interact with your brand they may have different kinds of emotional experiences and they may be excited. What you don’t want, is for that excitement to be boiling blood or end on a low.

As individuals, we have a brand too. It could be our fashion sense, the way we speak, the way we engage with others. For some, the personal brand is a carefully curated aspect of their identity. Likely something distinctive, memorable, and potentially long last. You may or may not work hard on your personal brand but as a business, you cannot afford to neglect it.

If you’re a small or medium-sized business that hasn’t been around for a long time, then the chances are that you are trying to establish your brand and identity in which case there is no better place to start than with thinking about exactly what it is that you want to say about your business.

A successful brand has a powerful purpose behind it which is articulated in how it interacts with customers and prospects and how it presents itself. One of the reasons, for example, that some people choose to always stay at the same hotel group, is that they enjoy the same experience wherever they are in the world. That can be boring to some, but to others, it produces a comforting monotony that they might need as a safe haven. Similarly, individuals who make an extra special effort to travel with particular airlines or rent from particular car-hire companies, is that they are looking to get some kind of special treatment or reward over and above the kinds of treatment that ad hoc customers have.

A brand, for an organization, is something that ensures, day in day out, and delivers on a particular promise of an experience consistently either through products or service.

What is a CMDM platform?

Across the globe, in all industry segments, data drives business processes, and systems.

The overall organization, its employees, and its customers benefit when this data is shared and accessible across all business units. A unified single point of access for the same customer lists and data used to run the business. On the whole, business data users within the organization generally assume that the customer data that they have access to is consistent across the whole business until they identify anomalies.

The reality though, is that customer data evolves in a more organic and somewhat haphazard way than data management professionals would prefer. This is especially true in larger organizations. Mergers and business acquisitions, projects and initiatives, and other general business activities often result in multiple systems being created, that often perform a similar or exact same function but for a variety of reasons, these redundancies must coexist.

The result is that these conditions inevitably lead to inconsistencies in the overall data structures and the data values between the various systems. This variance leads to increased data management costs and organizational risks.

The general consensus is that both data management and organizational costs and risk can be reduced through the dual strategies of Master Data Management and Reference Data Management.

Master Data Management is about the management of data that relates to organizational entities. These organizational entities are objects like logical financial structures, assets, locations, products, customers, suppliers, and employees.

These same structures provide the necessary context for smoothing of business transactions and transactional and business activity analysis.

Within them, are entities, real-world persons, organizations, places, and things as virtual objects. These same entities are represented by entity instances. In digital forms, they are effectively digital entities but really they are data records. Master Data should represent the authoritative, most accurate data available about key business entities.

When managed well, Master Data entities are trustworthy and can be used by employees in partner engagement with confidence. Surrounding these entities, are business rules that dictate formats, allowable ranges, and characteristics that should be applied to appropriately frame the master data values held.

Common organizational master data may include data that relates to partners that are made up of private individuals, organizations, and their employees. That same data may describe their role, their relationships, and essential attributes that might be useful for engaging with them as an organization.

Typical people-based master data entities are objects like customer, citizen, patient, vendor, supplier, agent, business partner, competitor, employee, or student.

Types of Customer Master Data Management

Generally speaking, Master Data Management is thought of as being leveraged in four different ways in an organization. These approaches are, for the most part, exactly the same for the management of customers, vendor, employee, product master or any other master data object in an organization.

Consider what you hope to achieve from implementing MDM. Pretectum observes that implementing customer MDM can be considered, on one hand, to help meet compliance and regulatory obligations. It can be considered as a mechanism that reduces risk and ensures business process optimization too. For some, it is simply recognised as an essential piece of the puzzle in having a better view and understanding of the customer. In reality, though, MDM and customer MDM, in particular, can serve to address all of these needs and potentially more.

Pretectum’s view is that one absolutely critical aspect of all of this is the establishment of an authoritative, consistent and correct understanding of who and what a given customer is. The benefits that flow from managed and controlled understanding under a CMDM could range from cost and operational savings in maintenance of the customer master to reduced loss and risk through collections and fraud avoidance when working with the different buyer and consumption audiences and prospects accompanied by increases in confidence and trust amongst your employees and associates.

Customer Master Data is important and here’s why

Data management includes practicing a discipline in the development, execution, and supervision of plans, programs, policies, and practices that protect, control, deliver and enhance the quality and value of data and information in the organization.

Data security is an essential part of data management and Pretectum takes pride in the fact that it uses the latest methods and techniques to ensure that customer data remains secure and protected but is still able to be used by the business as required. 

Making use of a modern cloud platform like the Pretectum C-MDM protects not only the integrity of the data but also provides assurance to employees and companies that data loss, data breaches, and data thefts are less likely.

Only through effective customer data management will you minimize the occurrence of errors and reduce the damage that bad master data can cause. Transcription, poor integration, and legacy methods used for capturing customer data introduce a greater likelihood of customer master data errors. With centralized customer master data management underpinned by data validation and data quality, your business has the best chance at creating and retaining the most valuable business data asset – your customer master.

Consumer Loyalty and Customer Master Data

In a nutshell, a loyalty program is another marketing mix element. A part of any marketing strategy Loyalty Programs is designed to encourage customers to sustain their shopping or use the services of a business associated with the brand and program.

Loyalty programs cover most types of commerce, each having different features and rewards. Industry segments that have leveraged broad loyalty programs include financial credit, hospitality & travel, retail and entertainment.

Pretectum feels that one of the ways to mitigate some of the aspects of customer service and multi-channel interaction is through the convergence on a single-source-of-truth in relation to the customer master. If your sales, service, support and loyalty programs are all reading from the same song-sheet, a centralized customer master data hub, then the ability to service the same message consistently and coherently is greatly improved. This in turn leads to a greater likelihood of retention.