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10 Customer Data Roles in Customer Relationship Management

Customer data plays a crucial role in customer relationship management as it provides valuable insights into customer behavior, preferences, and interactions with your organization.

Having accurate and up-to-date customer data can help your organization better understand consumers and provide personalized experiences that foster loyalty and improve satisfaction and confidence in your products or services.

Harvard Business Review contributor and business expert Barbara Bund Jackson has found this is very valuable through her research.

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What is customer MDM?

Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) is a process and technology used by organizations to ensure that customer data is accurate, consistent, and up-to-date across all systems and applications.

CMDM aims to provide a single source of truth for customer information by creating a centralized repository of customer data and managing the quality, governance, and integration of this data across the enterprise.

Customer Master Data Management helps organizations to improve customer experience, reduce data duplication and errors, enhance data security and privacy, and support informed business decisions by providing a comprehensive view of customer information.

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Customer Master Data Management is strategic

Putting a price on data is a tough task to perform if your business is not “in the business” of selling data. The real question though, is does your organization recognize its arguably most valuable data asset – customer master data, as a valuable resource? The true value of that data more than likely hides in how you use it.

Customer data holds enormous economic potential if managed well and appropriately leveraged. The challenge though is that many companies struggle with proper handling and syndication of their data. Further, they don’t think about their customer data strategically. They don’t take what they have and convert the data that is in hand, into actionable information. Worse, they may not be managing their customer data in any meaningful way, they may have data all over the place in systems, spreadsheets and even email.

By implementing some data management best practices around customer data, these same businesses could be thinking more strategically especially if they are ensuring that their data is accurate and aligned with their business objectives.

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Is your data of good enough quality for Customer MDM?

Customer data management (CDM) is one of the most important aspects of customer experience management. It helps companies get to know their customers, understand their preferences and needs, and deliver personalized services and experiences that keep customers happy and loyal. A key element of CDM is data quality.

Data quality refers to how accurately your company’s information about its customers reflects reality. If you don’t have good-quality customer data, your efforts will be wasted on inaccurate information about those customers—including ones who can’t be found when they need help with a problem or question!

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The Customer Master and Data Governance

Customer master data management (CMDM) and customer data governance are co-dependent disciplines. Successful CMDM is not possible with at least a few key data governance elements.

While the CMDM may be understood as principally the technology, the actual data governance is the people, processes and technology.

With Pretectum’s CMDM we feel that the three are inextricably linked and so do not see it as being possible to pick up a solution like CMDM without data governance.

The reverse may be true. You may have data governance without master data management but then the effectiveness of your data governance policies and procedures have to be called into question.

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An automotive case study in meeting customer needs

Japan’s third-largest car manufacturer is Nissan and they are currently improving their operation practices as they aim for better sales output and of course brand awareness.

Nissan is considered an example of one a European car brand that is notable and successful. Founded in 1933 by Engineer Kenjiro Den, Nissan initially produced just motorcycle engines before branching out into automobile production in 1934.

For more than 80 years Nissan has built cars in Japan and in developing markets around Europe (and beyond) selling more than 4M units annually under the Nissan brand – including well-known models like the Nissan Leaf and Nissan X-Trail SUVs.

Nissan is also the owner of the premium Infiniti brand and the heritage brand Datsun which it discontinued on April 22. In addition to cars and trucks, it has in-house performance tuning products and cars labelled Nismo

It is a tough job, focusing on the environment, vehicle and product quality and customer loyalty. The approach has to be multi-pronged and is driven by data.

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Customer Master Data Management – what to expect

Defining the approach for Customer Master Data Management (MDM) for your organization means also understanding the boundaries of functionality. Define it right and you will have a goldmine of opportunities.

The term MDM has become progressively ambiguous over the years as vendors have branched out into areas of functionality that are not necessarily aligned with the optimal concept of master data management. This is just as true for the customer MDM as it is for the supplier, the employee and other master data elements.

Pretectum’s view is that IT should not own or manage the content of the MDM, they should care for the platform but the ownership of the data and the quality of the data should rest within the business and business users.

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Customer types, patterns and segments

Whether you’re in Product or Service management, Sales, or Marketing you know that having an understanding of the customer, analyzing, and keeping track of their behaviour is critical for the effectiveness of your business.

Customers make thousands of calculated and spur-of-the-moment decisions every waking hour of the day from deciding what they will eat to what they’ll wear. It is easy to think that the many ‘buy’ decisions, in particular, are made without too much thought, particularly the less significant ones.

Decoding the thought processes behind customer decisions is no mean feat, particularly if you don’t have the data to back up your hypotheses around why customers do certain things.

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What do customers say when you’re not in the room?

In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive markets, successful brands have to be consistent in the way that they communicate with their audiences across all channels and also need to be consistent and superior in the customer and audience experience. This may be across many applications, many different types of interaction and through the message and communication of all personnel and mediums.

The only way to harness the power of that customer data is with a customer master data management platform that ensures that the data that you have is complete, comprehensive, accurate and relevant to the job you want to do. Further, you need to gather and maintain this data in a compliant and consented way. That data needs to also be secure but at the same time accessible to the business areas that need it—no mean feat in the current era of heightened concerns about privacy and corporate personal data abuse.

Pretectum has a scalable secure solution that at the same time offers flexibility and structure in a way that is attuned to the way your business prefers to work. We think of it as the Pretectum Advantage.