Master Data Management and Customer Retention

In these economic times, organizations are focused intensely on customer retention and preservation.  A key part of preservation is an organization’s ability to gain repeat orders or contract renewals with their existing customers.

As people and not institutions are the one who make buying decisions, it is mandatory for organizations to communicate with all of the contacts at their customer locations who are involved in buying decisions.  However, every day on the news you hear more and more about company layoffs.  Further, the economic situation is predicted to get worse before it gets better and therefore some key contacts may no longer be at the company.  Consequently, it is critical for an organization to have a data integration/data management strategy to make sure that you are able to communicate with all influential contacts at your customers.

Master Data Management or Customer Data Integration software can help you correlate all of the contacts that you have with an organization.  These contacts could be spread across multiple data sources and the same or related contact and entity names can be presented in a variety of different ways.  If your key contact at a company leaves, it’s imperative that you have backup contacts at the organization so that you can continue the relationship.  Further, it’s important that you do not wait to communicate with the influencers at an organization until your key contact leaves because at that point it may be too late to build the relationship.  Additionally, an organization cannot rely on its sales reps to be the sole builder of the relationships with the additional contacts.  The sale rep may not be focused on building the relationships with all of the influencers.  Further, if the sales rep leaves your organization and the customer contacts are not correlated in the database, then the client contacts and relationship may be lost forever.  In these uncertain economic times, the risk of the loss of an existing client relationship is not one that an organization can afford to take.