All Things Data

Master Data Management Business Drivers

I recently came across a survey from Gartner ranking the primary business drivers of current MDM plans/initiatives. 

According to the survey, the current MDM business drivers ranked in order of highest priority are:

1. Cost Optimization & Efficiencies
2. Compliance & Risk Management
3. Revenue & Profit Growth

As Cost Optimization & Efficiencies is the number one business driver (43.5%), I thought we’d take a look at how MDM can help in this area.

Here are a few cost optimization & efficiencies that an organization can achieve with an MDM initiative:

• Allocation of Resources – Matching and linking data from multiple data source can help you understand the proper number of customers, prospects, market potential, market penetration, resources being used to sell and service customers, and other items.  This understanding can help an organization measure the current status of the business and analyze where the business is heading.  Thereafter, an organization can determine the proper number of sales reps, customer service reps, distribution centers, and other cost factors in order to reduce expenses without jeopardizing revenue.

• Employee efficiency – With information at their finger tips, customer service reps can view the complete and accurate authorized information about a customer across data silos in order to help preserve customers and potentially up-sell and cross-sell existing customers when the opportunity exists.  Similarly, sales reps can have a single view of their customer in order to prioritize who they should target.  Further, sales reps can be armed with the best available information to help up-sell and cross-sell their existing customers.  Other departments can also perform their jobs in a more efficient and effective manner with a single view of the customer.

• Multi-Channel Interactions – First, customers and prospects may initiate contact with your organization through multiple channels.  MDM is needed so that you can correlate these multiple touches in separate sources and identify them as being part of the same opportunity or issue.  Additionally, there may be multiple departments in your organization that are involved in selling or servicing a customer.  These multiple departments may be directly communicating with the customer or they may be only communicating internally.  Either way, it is important that everyone is on the same page by knowing all the relevant information from the separate silos in order to service the customer as effectively and efficiently as possible.

In addition to the examples above, Andrew White from Gartner offers some additional cost savings and efficiencies in his blog entry, Economic woes will drive need for MDM.

3 questions you should ask yourself when considering Customer Data Integration/Master Data Management

Master Data Management is one of the fastest growing information technology applications and therefore you might be asking yourself if this is something that you should be looking at for your organization.  Master Data Management can involve the integration of many data types.  However, for the purposes of this discussion, I am going to focus on a certain type of MDM, Customer Data Integration (“CDI”).

Here are 3 questions that you should ask yourself to see if you may benefit from CDI/MDM:

Is it a struggle for your organization to accurately and completely count the right number of prospects and customers?

Executives need to understand your organization’s complete and accurate number of customers and prospects.  Many times executives need to understand this information with some type of parameters, such as how many customers there are by region, product line, or some other criteria.  Sometimes even providing a list of who are your best customers, top 20 customers, etc. can be a challenge.  This is due to the various representations of the company name, multiple location and contact names for the same or related organization, data for the same or related organization being entered in multiple data sources without an indicator linking the different data sources, and other factors.

However, this information can help determine:

• How should costs and investments such as sales reps, services locations, distribution centers, marketing campaigns, and other resources are allocated.

• Who are your best customers and therefore should require a lot of attention and resource from your organization in order to preserve your key relationships in these uncertain economic times.

Is there information in multiple data sources that can help reps cross-sell, up-sell, and overall better manage accounts?

Sales reps need to be armed with information in order to reach their sales goals.  A sales rep needs to determine which customers they should target, when they should target them, and what should they be promoting.  Typically, the answers to these questions are found in multiple data sources.  Further, if there are multiple representations, locations, and contacts for the same or related organization, without a CDI/MDM integration, the rep maybe looking at incomplete data if the rep is just looking at a single entry in a database system. 

Here are some examples of items that a rep could see at their finger tips with a CDI/MDM solution:

• An integrated view from one or more financial systems can provide how much revenue, what products and services the customer has purchased, and when the contract is up for renewal.

• An integrated view from the customer service database can provide the client’s support issues.

• An integrated from other sources can provide other valuable information such as how many people at the client are using your service and where in the process is an item that is being shipped.

Are data quality issues increasing costs and impacting sales?

Just about every organization has data quality issues.  These issues could be duplicate records, incomplete or inaccurate data, data elements in inappropriate data fields, and a lack of understanding of how separate data records are associated.  Data quality issues can be different for each organization. 

A big data quality issue today is the need to centrally manage and market to all the relationships that an organization has developed with a client.  These relationships could be key decision makers or influencers or they could be potential key decision makers and influencers should the current key decision makers and influencers leave your client.  Many times, these contacts are not contained in the company’s centralized CRM or other sales and marketing database.  They may be in communication systems like Outlook or Lotus Notes, customer service systems, financial systems, user systems, or other data sources.  Further, if your representatives only have these contacts in their handheld devices, once your rep leaves, the relationship may also leave.  Additionally, you need to build these relationships over time.  Otherwise, if you wait to make outreach to current or potential decision makers and influencers, it may be too late to build a relationship once the key decision maker has left.

A CDI/MDM solution can help you identify and resolve the data quality issues that are increasing your costs and decreasing your sales and marketing effectiveness.