Data Quality, the Multimarket Challenge, and the MDM Solution

I recently read an interesting article by Carol Krol in B to B magazine entitled, Improving data quality is job 1.  According to the article, in this “weakened economy, having accurate data becomes even more important to ensure targeted marketing messages actually reach customers and prospects.”  Further, a Forrester Research report indicates that cleaning up data and improving integration with customer data is a top B2B Chief Marketing Officer priority.  With this background, I thought I take a look at data quality and how it relates to master data management.

The Multichannel Challenge

The article goes on to state that “one of the big challenges to maintaining data quality is the multichannel sales process, which often results in customer data residing in silos.”  The article provides an example where someone may sign-up for an event online but buy something directly from a salesperson. 

In order to have a complete and accurate single view of the customer, these separate data silos need to be brought together.  As the article states, “that is not always easy to do”.    A sales person might enter the data as “Key Bank”.  The official name of the company is “Key Corp.” and may have been entered this way online.  Without the proper integration, these two names might be represented as two separate companies.

The Master Data Management (“MDM”) Solution

A MDM solution provides the matching algorithms and linking process that enables two different representations of the same organization, such as “Key Corp.” and “Key Bank” to be identified as part of the same organization.  This can be done even if the two different representations are in two completely separate databases or separate data silos.  In addition to company names, a MDM system can link contact names (or even non-company/contact information such as product information).

A MDM solution can improve data quality in a number of ways:

1. Identifying same and related organization names
2. Identifying same contact names
3. Building corporate hierarchies
4. Building best of breed records by utilizing missing data elements from separate data sources 
5. Identifying duplicate records

Some of the benefits of increased data quality from a MDM solution are:

1. Providing a complete and accurate single customer view for more effective and efficient sales, marketing, and customer service
2. Increased opportunities for referrals, up-selling, and cross-selling by building organizational hierarchies
3. More effective and less expensive direct marketing costs with accurate contact information and decreased duplication
4. Better analysis utilizing coordinated business intelligence across multiple data silos
5. More complete, accurate, and faster building or consolidating of separate data sources into new or legacy database systems