Master Data Management and Rightsizing the Business

In these difficult economic times, it’s important to cut expenses where ever possible.  But how do you know what and how much to cut?

The answers are in your data.

Your data can tell you many things such as:

1. How many customers and prospects that you have?
2. How much revenue by customer, sales territory, and market segment?
3. Where your customers and prospects are located?
4. How effective are certain marketing campaigns?

The answers to these questions and many others are the keys to making decisions regarding the allocation of resources.  Here are some examples:

• Knowing the proper number of customers and prospects and current and potential revenue by markets or territories lets you know how many sales reps, service personnel, service locations, and other expenses that can be consolidated to manage profitability.

• Knowing that someone you sent a direct mail piece has responded either by mail, by phone, through your website, or in-person is critical in understanding whether the campaign should be continued and how much budget should be allocated to future campaigns.

However, there are many challenges to utilizing your data to get the answers to these types of questions.  Here are some of the challenges:

1. Multiple records exist for the same or related customer or prospect entity or contact due to multiple contacts, multiple locations, lack of data uniformity for organization and contact names, and data entry errors for the same entity or contact in your data files.  This makes it difficult to properly report counts and eliminate duplications.  Over counting may result in a missed opportunity to reduce expenses.

2. Information is contained in separate data files such as the initial mailing campaign file, and the related responses by the mail, the web, by phone, and in-person.  The respondents may use different representations of their contact and organization names for the different response vehicles.  This makes it a difficult task to track the initial mailing with the actual results.

Customer Data Integration or Master Data Management software can help properly count the multiple representations of the same or related entity or contacts and correlate records that are contained in separate data silos through matching algorithms.  With the matching and linking via the software’s numbering schema, proper counts can be generated and information from separate data sources can be queried.  This information can help determine the maximum expense consolidation to manage profitability.