Most companies have customer master data somewhere in their systems. The challenge with the customer data is that many companies find it difficult to maintain that customer data and ensure that everyone that needs access to the customer data, in fact, has access to it in its latest and greatest form. It is suggested, in various pieces of research, that as little as 20% of business user time gets to be spent on actually using the data. The remaining time, according to HBR, is spent seeking out and preparing data.

Data is central to how we run our businesses today and customer data is often slap bang in the centre. Global market intelligence firm International Data Corporation (IDC) projects spending on general data and analytics to reach $274.3 billion by 2022, you can assume a large chunk of that will be on working on customer data.

Customer data, wherever it is found, is often contaminated with additional data that is not necessarily pertinent or current. The best solution to having exactly what you need is the implementation of customer master data management (C-MDM).

Having a C-MDM creates a common definition and a single view of what a customer is, by centralizing data and creating governance, compliance and security.

With the infinite number of possible data combinations and the average number of systems that may be involved (an average of around a dozen or more), any C-MDM project can be unnerving.

Getting started can be made easier though.

Here are some steps to make your customer master data management initiative a success.

Any master data management project’s starting point depends on where the business falls in the enterprise data management maturity model.

Every company is at a different stage and very few are starting from scratch or have only one source for the ‘customer’.

Clues to organizational master data maturity

• Business Divisions are focused on products, services or functions, so they don’t share customer data with others even if there is overlap or benefits
• Companies may have great customer data, but have inadequate control and governance over that data, so data gets duplicated and potentially goes stale.
• Non-organic growth activities result in acquisitions of data from elsewhere but this data may be misaligned, inadequate or simply not integrated
• Meteoric business growth leads to systems not being able to adjust in alignment with the needs of the business, resulting in data proliferation and islands of information.

So, what are the choices available to you, to remediate these kinds of problems?

Research and Identification

Identify who should be the custodians of the Customer Master and which pieces they should be responsible for. This will inform you of the controls and processes you have around customer record creation and maintenance.

Identify who uses the customer master and for what purpose. They could be using the data to engage in outbound customer marketing, billing, service or almost anything

Take an inventory of all the customer data repositories that people are curating or maintaining or using. This will inform you of your data control and proliferation changes and also hopefully give you a statistical count on how many raw records you have.

Define the ideal customer master

Create one or more common definitions of what a customer is and what a customer should look like (we recommend you start with just one). Consider then, the different lenses through which different business units, view and leverage the customer record.

Looking at the consumer customer record, consider that even a consumer may have many different pieces of contact data, emails, phones and actual addresses, some of which are for specific purposes. Home, work, delivery etc.

The idea is to identify data attributes that will be common to the majority of your customers and constitute the customer data point definition – this will become your customer master data model.

Get rid of the duplicates and bad data

After you have a master data model, you’ll want to ensure that your data is accurate and free of duplicates. If you have customer information in multiple systems, the chances are good that you will have duplicate customers with different information. You need to correct inaccuracies and converge on a unified view of the customer record. You will also need to clean up those records and report regularly on the effectiveness of your efforts!

Access and Control

Some sort of governance program will help you control your master data model and in particular the adjustments that will occur to it over time. You’ll also need controls baked into the model and the capture and maintenance processes to keep your data clean and accurate. Good governance ensures that customer data can be trusted and it provides accountability as you strive to keep it up to date and limit the control of and access to the data.

Some final thoughts

The Pretectum C-MDM helps you define your participants in the master data curation process, the solution allows you to define one or more models for what you consider the ideal customer master and then it further allows you to establish controls and measures around what the data should actually be. But Pretectum’s C-MDM goes a step further, it also allows you to physically build up your repository of customer records and syndicate them to whichever systems or users need the data in a hub and spoke approach using APIs and integrations.

The goal of any C-MDM is to create a single place for all your customer information, a single data source that you can use to inform your business decisions and systems. If you consider the workings of customer relationship management (CRM) systems, ERP’s and CDP’s, the value of a C-MDM is clear. It is not a transactional system, it is a master repository with controls.

Many companies think that their shiny new CRM, ERP or CDP will solve all their customer master data issues but without a solid understanding of customer data and a strategy for how it will be managed. When you move to those new systems you can often compound the problem rather than solve it by creating yet another system with its own data repository and governance rules.

Why not consider joining the Pretectum C-MDM Alpha trial and testing its usefulness for your organization?