Customer data covers a broad gamut of possibilities in different kinds of systems depending on the nature of the system and the intentions or purpose of the customer records.
At the most basic level customer master data in particulr, is necessary for having a better understanding of the customers, their needs, wants and desires; and how your business can address them.
Four basic groups interact with customers. Marketeers, Sales-people, Accountants and Service or Support. There may be others but these four groups have distinctive requirements of their own in relation to the customer. Though customers come in a variety of shapes and sizes, the fundamentals of the data needs of these individual groups remain largely static and any inconsistency across the stakeholders’ views of the customer data needs to likely be addressed withe a coherent and unified data management approach.
It is generally accepted that data at rest will deteriorate over time. People die, change jobs, get married, move etc. Keeping track of the attributes of the customer is therefore an ongoing challenge.
The basic personal customer information forms the basis of a golden thread that connects all other aspects of the digital customer and the interactions with that customer.
The average CRM system for example, will hold around 50 – 60 attributes for the customer including honorifics, names, contact information like addresses, digital, postal, physical etc and may contain other information like membership details, dates of birth etc. data like gender and income also may form a part of the basic data.
Organizations will use aggregations and summations of this data as well as aggregations of service, support and sales data to formulate a more complete picture of the customer.
It is important to ensure that all stakeholder teams are aware of the data that is available and collectively agree on the critical data elements that they care about, know who is responsible for what, and subscribe to a data management programme that will ensure that the quality of the data is somewhat assured.
Data collection and management
Of itself, the customer data probably offers little value except to individual account managers or service agents. An overarching data strategy however, will provide some indications of of how the data might be used and what can be shared and what should secured or isolated or even discarded.
It would not be unusual to have stakeholders declare the minimum required data and then determine that for many records that minimum required data is defective, incomplete or wholly missing. This means that your organization needs to put plans in place to remediate. Remediation can take many forms, including merging multiple datasets and gleaning the critical data based on a grouping of related records. Another approach might involve asking customers to provide the missing data or verify their own data and another approach might be one where one makes use of a third party to provide data verification or validation services by way of API or file updates. The choice your organization will make, will depend on many factors including, the level of direct interaction that your teams have with partners and customers.
While a CRM can often be considered as a potential central repository or system of record with a definitive customer record, more often than not, the CRM’s utility is limited to effective commercial engagement with the customer. A customer data platform, owned by the marketing team may carry other attributes of the customer and a separate billing system might not be entirely unusual even though many CRM systems can perform customer billing and collections also.
Many CRM solutions come with built in deduplication, and data enrichment plugins. Some will even offer tight integration with other platforms like Informatica, Transformania, CloudDingo and the like.
Ultimately though, the real solution to avoiding data quality issues is a data curation process often referred to as master data management (MDM) that leans heavily on the intake and maintenance process either within the CRM platform itself or in a separate platform with integration. Gartner describes MDM as critical for CRM optimization. MDM itself is not transactional in nature, though it does provide events that relate to the evolution of the data over time based on new insights and new information. Vendors like Ataccama, Contentserv, IBM, Informatica, PiLog, Pretectum, Profisee, Reltio, Riversand, SAP, Semarchy, Stibo Systems, Syniti, TIBCO Software, Viamedici, Winshuttle all offer MDM solutions with varying capabilities.
Not all specialise in dealing with CRM specifically and customer data in particular so look to the strengths that need to align with the needs of your business.