Customer data is broad-spectrum in nature, it covers a lot of information about people that your company serves. At the most fundamental level, your customer data is a critical data asset that you need to understand your customers and guide how you can best serve them.

There are many kinds of data that you will have about the customer, from names to email addresses. phone numbers, job titles, date of birth and other personally identifiable information (PII) through to sales orders, quotations, service and support ticket records, policies, warranties, certificates etc. You may even know where they work, what kind of devices they use and more about their families!

The possibilities are almost seemingly limitless, depending on the purpose and intent you have for that data.

Just like their physiology, customer data comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. You may have their data stored in more than one system of record or repository and simply making sense of the customer data that you have, may seem daunting especially if you have doubts about the consistency, accuracy and general quality of your customer data.

This is why we talk at Pretectum, about focus, a focus on what matters and having the right customer data perspective. We have observed that many organizations fail to establish some fundamental building blocks for building and using customer data effectively.

We believe that you are likely to have four main missions around your customer data

• Customer data definition
• Preventing bad data creation
• Assessing the quality of customer data
• Reporting and distributing customer data

Customer data definition
Basic personal customer data frames aspects of your fundamental understanding of each relationship you have with every customer. Out of the box configuration, standard data fields in an ERP, CRM or CDP should be considered minimum basic data. Names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers and relationships are all examples of basic customer data.

Demographic data, such as gender, family connections, income, social media data or firmographic data can also be basic customer data but not necessarily so.

Preventing bad data creation
We believe there is only one way to prevent the creation of bad customer data and that is through the introduction of rigour into the customer data creation process.

Whether your personnel are using batch loading methods, technology-based interfaces or manual entry methods, the best way to ensure that you are maintaining the best view of the customer is one where the journey to data creation is a curated one.

This means creating and maintaining controls and restrictions around the customer data that can be created and the ways in which that same data is edited and maintained.

Assessing the quality of your customer data
We believe there are an infinite number of ways to assess customer data quality but business process owners know what really matters and should have the tools and methods available to support their data quality assessment.

These data quality assessment methods should be rooted in the curation process, whereby rules, measures and controls that you maintain for data creation should be the same rules, measures and controls that you use for data quality assessment

Not only does this maintain a unified view and understanding of the data that you have, and the maintenance thereof, it also means that you can consider extensions to the portfolio of customer master data according to the evolving needs of your business with some degree of confidence that you are not creating a potential compounding problem of poor data quality in your customer master data.

Reporting and distributing customer data
Once you’ve created your customer data definition, defined all the rules around that data and determined who can and should have access to the data and the potential maintenance thereof; you need to consider how you will make it available for use by the wider community of business users in your business.

Everyone from product management through sales, marketing, service and support will have an interest in customer data because it tells a story about past success and prospective opportunities.

For best effect, when considering the syndication of customer data, you need to determine the purpose and intent that you have around the customer data that you have. In this light, you need to consider the customer data goal.

The customer data goal
In itself, customer data offers only the most minimal value to an organization. Harnessing customer data to improve the customer experience or develop new products or features is a very common first goal.

Accelerating revenue growth, profit maximization, renewal maintenance, can be additional motivators. These goals have nothing to do with the data itself but they have everything to do with what you need to have in place and the level of confidence that you need to have around the quality of the customer data that you have.

Competition landscape
It is not unusual to draw parallels between your business and your nearest competitors, to look to the customers that they have, the way that they interact with them and the level of commitment and recurrent business that they harvest from their existing customers and potentially how that influences prospects.

Many organizations leverage customer data in a secure and scalable way and have a disciplined approach to making customer data accessible to the wider organization. Thinking about your competitors, do you believe that they have better data and a better handle on the customer data curation process?

This may be difficult information to glean from your competitors, but the good news is that Pretectum’s C-MDM takes a lot of the guesswork out of the process for you, by suggesting the rules, controls and measures that you should have in place for your customer data.

Further, intelligence under the hood, helps you to curate perfect sets of customer data according to the needs, purposes and intentions that your business has for customer master data management.

Even more significantly, Pretectum C-MDM looks to the characteristics of your business and compares that with similar entities in your industry segment to suggest, hone and refine the data governance process for your customer data according to the needs that your business has, but taking advantage of the concept of crowdsourced insight and policy.

Data Essentials
The advantage of the Pretectum C-MDM approach is that data that you have today, that you think is trivial and superfluous and perhaps not even that useful, may prove to be particularly valuable for some very specific use cases that you currently don’t use it for today.

This means, that although you may have some very specific needs that you want to address today, you can have a lens on your customer data that provides only the bare essentials or critically necessary data for that particular purpose but you continue to maintain and curate other data that you may wish to use at some point in the future, thereby leveraging a different lens on the customer master.

The era of privacy regulation
Data protection regulations like the US Privacy Act of 1974, COPPA, the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA), Californian Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and Europe’s GDPR along with industry-specific data security requirements like HIPAA and PCI are increasingly commonplace in our data-centric economy.

The Pretectum platform holds any data that you choose to store, in an encrypted and secure way according to the laws of your country and in a way that meets the intent and objectives of regulation.

Pretectum goes a step further though, in addition to ensuring that your customer data is secure, Pretectum also supports you in being able to inform your customers about the data that you have and allows you to afford them the opportunity to curate the data that you have. This consent-based approach means that your customers can tell you how they would like you to use their data and what you may do with their data. In addition, they can maintain their vital statistics in a way that supports your data being continuously up to date.

Update your vision for customer data today and consider a new perspective on the customer with Pretectum C-MDM.