Using Master Data Management to manage customer data

Master Data Management helps you continually improve your data and allows enriching a customer profile with new attributes. It can match a customer’s profile to their web account or social networking profile. A 360-degree view of your customers and their interactions with your brand across various channels helps you develop closer relationships and a stickier user experience.

With a consistent strategy of Master Data Management you can collate data from different sources, ensure data is clean and complete, build rules to prevent data duplication, analyze and continuously improve the quality of master data, share a unified view of master data in real time with all relevant departments.

With MDM and real-time notifications, an organization that lacked a single trusted view can instantly respond in real time, take advantage of opportunities, avert problems before they escalate, and develop closer customer relationships. Besides it, data management helps you quickly configure all parameters such as data models, import maps, business rules, and workflows. It includes starter templates to get you up and running quickly. Projects can easily be built in incremental phases with hot deployment of changes along the way.

How MDM helps you build a 360-degree view of your customers:

• Provides a foundation

Building a foundation for MDM requires a collaborative agreement on rules that define and maintain uniformity, accuracy, and consistency of data shared across the enterprise. For example, a customer usually doesn’t give their address for an in-store purchase, but they do when they buy online. Based on the processes, standards, and rules you define, the system matches and merges these two entries to create a single, more complete entry for this person in your master data repository.

• Cleanses and unifies

Fully cleansed and unified master data underlies insights gained from big data. Unique identifiers in each master data record allow you to match it to real-world entities and events. For example: If a customer complains about one of your products on a social network, you would like to identify them and the product they own. With this information, your customer support team can take action to solve the customer’s problem.

• Becomes the single-source of truth.

Integrating MDM data with structured and unstructured data helps you achieve a 360-degree view of your customers that could include location, contact information, purchase history, preferences for online or in-person shopping, and other details that can help you know your customer better.

Data governance is key  

Ensuring data quality and consistency is important, but to ensure data is relevant to business operations, and that it can drive business growth, you need strong alignment between business and IT to build and manage the MDM stack. To make this happen, you need to provision a strategic data governance initiative managed by a governance council that defines goals and principles for the governance program, policies and processes to implement data governance, and the roles and responsibilities of the participants. For data to deliver value and become a differentiator, the council needs to identify and understand what it’s trying to achieve. It’s important to understand what matters to business managers as well as to end users who use and depend on the data. People responsible for stewardship ensure proper execution of workflows and business rules and oversee adherence to the defined data standards. Stewards monitor data quality and take corrective actions to ensure data is accurate at any given time.

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