Keeping good and reliable customer records is critical to maintaining a consistent and coherent relationship with the customer and it is something that CRM, ERP and CDP solutions don’t necessarily make special efforts to sustain. Our observation is that fast delivery of ERP, CRM and CDP solutions accompanied by the natural deterioration of customer data over time, leads to poor and unreliable records.

The one thing that is consistent across customers in all industries, is that they expect their needs to be met and often they hope that their expectations will be exceeded. Customers have no idea how you keep and maintain your records and have no concept of understanding all the effort and systems that you have in play to service them, frankly speaking, they should not need to worry about this either.

Consumers, in particular, hope and pray that short hold time when they try to reach a customer service person suggests that you are simply waiting for them to call and have all their details just a few keyboard taps away from your customer service reps, agents and account managers.

This means you need to look at not only the transactional relationship with the customer but more particularly, the master and referential data associated with the customer. Master Data, in particular, is essential information for ensuring that your representatives are aligned with their needs. This will wash out in the interaction with the customer, it comes through in your dealings with them.

Some simple examples are knowing your gender, your geographic location, perhaps even your age, contact details and then the associated asset or inventory of related objects. When a person calls from a particular number, your CLI system for example would be at an advantage if the number is tied to the customer record and accordingly routes the call to the best appropriate agent. When a customer’s account suggests that they have particular assets, the currency of those assets is appropriately and correctly reflected against the correct custom master record.

The volume and velocity of relationships that your organization curates mean that personalization is increasingly difficult. The threads of connection with the customer become increasingly constricted and the clarity on the customer becomes very fuzzy around the edges for your personnel, but the technology and master data, in particular, can help to draw in the connection and broaden the touchpoints that an accomplished service, sales or support representative can leverage.

Knowing everything necessary to engage with the customer and having it appropriately maintained can help you to focus on how best to help them, and can also make your agents the person that makes them feel like their business is being dealt with by a professional, caring, sharing sort of a person.

To help, collect the most pertinent info from the person you would contact. Keep it current and use it when you contact them and encourage your face to face agents to refresh their familiarity with that data before a meeting. Look to last actions and transactions from your transactional systems before making a call and make sure your personnel follow through with their commitments.

Leveraging a Customer Master Data Management solution like the Pretectum C-MDM gives you the advantage of allowing you to define what matters in your customer records and what constitutes a view of quality, You can learn more by signing up for a preview.