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.

Extension of time applications or dealing with excessive costs – guidance on what courts will accept

A recent High Court judgment set some markers down for how judges in commercial litigation will approach repeated extension of time applications and how costs incurred will be  assessed; the judgment makes clear that excesses in either area will be questioned at least. His Honour Judge Pelling QC provided some useful guidance in the case […]

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Holiday pay for “self-employed” contractors?

When is “self-employed” not really “self-employed” – and why does it matter? The recent Court of Appeal decision Gary Smith -v- Pimlico Plumbers Limited will have a huge impact on businesses who wrongly classify workers as self-employed contractors. Mr Smith’s legal battle against Pimlico Plumbers (Pimlico) began in 2011 and the first hurdle was for […]

The post Holiday pay for “self-employed” contractors? first appeared on Harrison Clark Rickerbys.

Taking customers by the hand

To achieve an understanding and develop a customer brand advocacy program your business needs data to help identify advocates and influencers and unpaid spokesmen and referrers. The best bet for building and managing this data is by using a centralized customer master data management system like that offered by Pretectum.

You’ll want to take the data that a customer provides you with and harness it for future communications, to extend offers, provide promotional messages and of course, hone, refine and customize the customer’s experience every time they visit your website, your storefront or a system that you have, that they might need access to. A solid execution plan will have this data held centrally in a hub that disseminates it to whoever and wherever it needs to be; webshop, support portal, billing system and even point of sales and mobile app.

With the Pretectum C-MDM your business has the flexibility of deciding what you want to track and of course who you want to track and why.

Customer data and business goodwill

In accounting, “goodwill” is classified on a balance sheet as an intangible asset. This asset arises when an existing business is acquired and the market value of the inventory, plant and equipoment and other assets is less than the value paid for the business. So, “goodwill” on the balance sheet represents assets that are not separately identifiable. Per a nice description in Wikipedia – technically, it is not “identifiable assets that are capable of being separated or divided from the entity and sold, transferred, licensed, rented, or exchanged, either individually or together with a related contract, identifiable asset, or liability”. Many readers might be familiar with the concept of asset-strippers or corporate-raiders. These are typically investors that buy companies for their assets and not for the goodwill. They’ll then systematically liquid parts or assets within the company they acquire because the sum of the market value of the assets is greater than the balance sheet value. You could argue that there is negative goodwill in such organizations because the value of the business is greater when liquidated than running it as a unified going concern.  Goodwill also does not include contractual or other legal rights regardless of whether those are transferable or separable from the entity or other rights and obligations. Per accounting standards, goodwill is evaluated periodically for any possible impairment in value.

Pretectum believes that the best way to manage your customer master data assets is with a centralized master data management platform like the Pretectum cloud-based C-MDM.