photography of gray sports car

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.

man in red jacket standing using telescope while standing on a cliff of a mountain

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.

an abstract design

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.

multiethnic friends gossiping behind attentive classmate

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.