5 Ways MDM Can Help Streamline Your Business

Example of misaligned customer data. Neither entry is incorrect, but they don't communicate with one another. When this type of mismatch is repeated and compounded millions of times over among an organization's various silos, the net effect is a significant reduction of productivity, work flow and sales efficiency.



5 Ways MDM Can Help Streamline Your Business

Many businesses today struggle with customer retention and acquisition in an environment of increased competition, globalization and multi-channel engagement. An enterprise-wide, integrated and holistic approach is necessary to manage challenges like these, whereby every department in the organization works collaboratively on strategic, tactical and operational levels. Organizations need to resolve any impediments that result in reduced customer satisfaction or loss of business opportunities.

One of the key challenges companies face is due to the variety of IT systems implemented by each function. Businesses tend to use a multitude of applications which operate in silos - such as CRMs, ERPs and other financial, marketing, customer support, web and mobile apps. These systems are either purchased from assorted vendors or custom-built at different times, resulting in a complex web of business processes. To complicate matters, new sources of data are added continuously, such as cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions and customer engagement data via blogs, news, Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and other social media.

Master Data Management (MDM) technology allows companies to integrate various silo applications in real-time to maximize collaboration among departments, and builds the requisite 360 degree perspective essential for cross-application analyses. MDM refers to the process of creating and managing data that an organization must have as a single master copy, called the master data. Usually, master data can include customers, vendors, employees and products, but can differ by different industries and even different companies within the same industry. MDM is important because it offers the enterprise a single version of truth. Without a clearly defined master data record, the enterprise runs the risk of having multiple copies of data which are inconsistent with one another. MDM provides the necessary cross-reference to integrate various silo applications at the data level and provides a foundation for advanced business analytics.

Here are some of the key reasons why companies should implement MDM.


1. Retain existing customers by providing excellent customer service

The single best thing you can do for your business is to build true customer loyalty, one customer at a time. Everything changes when a customer becomes a loyal customer. Businesses with loyal customers grow faster than others when times are good, and they have the most breathing room when times are bad. At its root, creating loyal customers involves taking the time to learn about your customers individually, and then using simple systems to turn that knowledge into enduring business relationships. For example, in the hospitality business, it is very important to ensure that frequent business travelers remain loyal to your brand, as the overall lifetime value of such customers is far greater. It is significantly less expensive to retain existing customers then acquire new ones.

One of the key challenges in providing excellent customer satisfaction is the lack of accurate customer profiles captured at an enterprise level. Most companies have deployed purpose-built applications such as CRMs, ERPs, support and websites, which result in various attributes captured in each individual system, but not shared across the enterprise. When information is changed in one system, the other systems remain uninformed. An MDM platform builds enterprise-wide master data that combines the most up-to-date and reliable information across all silo applications and shares it with all internal and external applications. The accurate 360 degree view of the customer helps companies to fine-tune their sales and support efforts, ensuring that loyal customers remain loyal, and not lost in the abyss of data chaos.


2. Offer the right product or service at the right time to the right customer

Companies struggle constantly to accurately analyze information stored within its applications, in order to answer various questions and understand customer behavior. Executives need to know answers to questions such as:

· Who will remain a loyal customer and who won't?

· What marketing approach is most likely to increase sales?

· What can customer buying patterns tell us about improving inventory control?

· What type of credit approval processes work best for our customer base, as well as for us?

Data warehousing and mining tools provide means to "slice and dice" information based on various measures. But what if the information is stored across various silo applications such as ERPs, CRMs, marketing, accounting, customer support apps and websites? In today’s hyper-competitive environment, it is very important for executives to be able to perform analyses which span application boundaries. For example, special outreach campaigns can be focused on customers who have placed orders from your company in the last six months and had support issues, but have not yet been contacted by your sales team. Such a query requires accurate cross-referencing of customer data stored in your ERP, CRM and support systems. MDM technology allows companies to easily build this cross-reference among silo application systems for key business entities such as customers, contacts, vendors, products, employees, etc. MDM provides the foundation for data analytics on which companies can build an advanced reporting system, that can easily be extended when implementing any new technology system.


3. Improve efficiency and effectiveness of your sales & marketing campaigns

Marketers today struggle constantly with ways to efficiently and effectively reach customers in multi-channel marketing campaigns, then measure the impact of their message and approach at individual customer levels. The way consumers communicate has changed dramatically, with six billion internet users, more than a billion Facebook users and over six billion mobile phone users - including over a billion smart phones. Marketing can no longer be passive by simply running TV or radio ads, but must become interactive within a complex ecosystem of multiple channels. The process of interaction can involve various means such as social media, search, and click - at the time of transaction as well as through indirect relationships.

MDM technology provides a means to capture the most up-to-date and preferred communication mediums at customer levels, for example, by capturing customer preferences and storing the latest email addresses, phone numbers, social media handles, etc. MDM provides a means to store results of various data analytics strategies that segment the customer base into various categories. Lastly, MDM can capture feedback from various campaigns at customer, household or individual contact levels to provide a 360 degree approach to marketing.


4. Reduce costs associated with point-to-point application integration

As companies turn to Software as a Service they must prepare for challenges which arise when integrating with legacy enterprise applications. As end users are realizing the benefits of cloud-based software: ease of procurement, universal accessibility and improved productivity, integration and software architects struggle to make it work with on-premise applications. One typically hears how companies deploying SaaS applications later struggle with ways to get the information back on premises as it needs to be retrofitted. Data goes out of sync and ends up as chaos.

MDM provides a technology foundation to integrate existing and potentially upcoming application deployments. It is much more economical and faster to deploy an MDM-based hub and spoke approach than to implement a point-to-point application integration. With an API-driven approach, MDM can significantly reduce costs associated with application integration, as compared to traditional point-to-point integration.


5. Reduce organizational chaos over data ownership and maintenance

Most managers know the nightmares that come with trying to explain or reconcile conflicting data sets to skeptical executives, and the headaches and second-guessing that occurs when there is less than 100% confidence in analytics data. Truly effective data governance helps eliminate those headaches by ensuring all key business information is standardized, validated, matched and merged across silo applications, and kept up-to-date. MDM provides data governance tools, processes and procedures to support enterprise-wide data consolidation requirements. Typical MDM projects result in organizations forming dedicated support teams to focus on most data issues and provide means of resolving them in a cost-effective manner. Learning from such data stewardship results in providing input for enterprise data governance frameworks.


~

Written by Shailesh Gala, CEO, SynapZen, a pioneer in MDMaaS (MDM as a Service) empowering customers to focus on growing their core business while leaving complex integration, data quality and data governance issues with a trusted partner. SynapZen’s multi-domain MDM hub allows clients to centralize key information (such as customers, contacts, vendors, products and employees) from all internal and external sources to build a master record representing a “Single version of Truth” or “360 degree view." SynapZen provides capabilities to standardize, cleanse, enrich, validate, fuzzy-match, relate and consolidate information from systems such as CRMs, ERPs, support, websites, marketing and social media. Visit us on the web at: