Tag: Master Data

What’s next after Enterprise 4.0 ?

Without critical customer information, the systems that businesses would hope to leverage to unburden consumers from being stuck in the information age and in fact flourishing in the imagination age will never fully materialise. Personalization of interactions and engagement experiences are at the top of the list.

Businesses will need to maximize the network effects that could be achieved through platforms, and control databases that store customer and user data that can in turn drive more control and predictability over the market. Online publisher Tim O’Reilly believes that businesses need to “leverage customer self-service and algorithmic data to reach out to the entire web, to the edges and not just the centre, to the long tail and not just the head”.

A richer more personalized experience starts to become a reality fueled by consumer information. Systems that are able to describe the person will have the advantage. More particularly, systems that make use of ZPD (zero-party data), i.e. data that consumers have willingly and consensually offered up will be the systems that are the most valuable.

Learn how the Pretectum CMDM can help your business keep up with the increased importance of customer MDM with a SaaS software solution designed specifically to address the challenges of Customer Master Data Management.

The industries most likely to lose your data, revealed

The industries most likely to lose your data, revealed
• Online companies are first, with 53 registered data breaches since 2004
• The healthcare industry comes in second, with 47 data breaches and almost 200,000,000 pieces of data leaked
• Financial companies are third, having registered 38 data breaches

The promise of MDM for Digital Transformation

Implementation of CMDM is transformative in the back office first, but then with the potential for a complete shift in the customer experience in relation to the potential for personalization and customized engagement but for this to happen, you have to be confident that your business is ready to embark upon such a journey.

MDM focuses principally on the management aspects of the customer with a respectful tip of the hat in relation to the duties performed by those trying to grow the business through marketing initiatives (CDP), the transactional systems (ERP, CRM, eCommerce, POS) and the reporting, analytics, forecasting and insights platforms.

Pretectum believes that where these other systems fall short, is either in the complexity of their implementation when focused on data management tasks, or their inability to unify the relationship over common data. We know this is a problem because even when these other systems are implemented with supposed master record management capabilities, they’re found to fall short of the varied expectations of the diverse teams that are expected to use them, or, in fact perhaps worse, access to them is constrained to a few, exclusively.

The Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) can operate in a number of different ways within any given business depending on the deployment approach. This approach is determined by the upstream or downstream influences and requirements of either business units, processes or technologies.

Social Shopping and Social Commerce

Social shopping or S Commerce is a type of eCommerce that seeks to involve people with similar tastes in an online shopping experience. Sites like Pinterest claim to differentiate because on the one hand they offer the ability to pin items of interest but on the other hand they allow targeted marketing and click-through referral opportunities through image relationships. Arguably TikTok and Snapchat are also powerful channels for brands to launch their eCommerce campaigns. In fact, perhaps more than 50% of Snap’s business is in Direct Response advertising.

Many social shopping sites are similar in feel and design to social curation site Pinterest. E-commerce experts suggest this is not coincidental, that the approach is catering to a new generation of shoppers who enjoy and expect a “Facebook experience” where users like and share as part of their online life and are seen to do this.

Social shopping sites, like Kaboodle and ShopStyle, offer recommendations to members in the same way that you’ll see on Amazon Etsy and eBay.

The concept of Social Shopping makes presentations personal, by providing members with the ability to create personal boards, preferences and lists. For these sites, stickiness comes in the concept of community and the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with friends and peers. The goal is to build community by encouraging members to talk about products and preferences and make suggestions directly to their friends and social contacts as they might if they were shopping together in actual bricks and mortar stores.

Social commerce is that segment of eCommerce where sellers can actually sell and not just market their products directly through the social media platform, they can also browse goods catalogues and make those direct purchases.

Unlike the more limited, social media marketing, true social commerce gives the customer the option to perform a direct checkout and settlement.

Right now this is a $90Bn market, so what are the implications for customer data and your business?

Social commerce is a subset of eCommerce makes it easy to measure and evaluate the performance of your ad spend with the various platforms. The social media platforms have built-in eCommerce metrics for impressions, engagement and reach. you can see the number of clicks, the number of views and the level of engagement and perhaps even the response sentiment. All these capabilities come at a price which erodes your potential customer lifetime value. With the average consumer spending around $400 – $500 per annum on social commerce, there are the many costs that are loaded up by the platforms to consider, from the ad spend through the commerce fees and charge and pay commission.

In reality, social commerce is there for shoppers, not businesses. Since the entire process is focused on the particulars of the Social Media platform and if it includes checkout you lose website traffic and the opportunity to harvest some important customer characteristics.

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.