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Where is the concept of customer in your call center?

Customer master data management (CMDM) is an essential component of a successful call center operation. It's viewed by top tier business as a critical part of their wider data governance program and has relevance to accounting, marketing, service, support, and sales teams.

CMDM ensures that customer data is centrally accessible, consistent, accurate, complete, and up-to-date, and is available to all who need it whenever they need it. I've tried here to elaborate the importance of CMDM in call center operations and how it might serve as a central hub for the control, management, data quality, and syndication of customer master data.

Few will disagree that iIn call center operations, customer interactions are the heart of the business; call centers want to be more than incident handlers and ticket creators - reps want to genuinely help customers and resolve issues at first interaction.

Customers expect quick, efficient, and personalized service; getting a ticket ID is a bit like getting the receipt but not the goods!

To meet customer expectations, call center agents need to have access to accurate and complete customer information. This information includes verifiable names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, perhaps even purchase history, and other relevant details.

Without accurate and complete data, agents cannot provide the level of service that customers demand and expect.

Call center operations also rely heavily on data to make informed decisions about business processes and customer service strategies in general. Inaccurate data leads to poor insights and cascades to bad decision logic, resulting in reduced customer satisfaction, potential churn, lowered productivity, and increased costs.

CMDM provides the concept of a centralized platform for managing customer data, ensuring that all stakeholders have access to the same accurate, complete, and up-to-date information.

The platform also serves as a single source of truth for customer data. It consolidates customer data from multiple sources, such as CRM systems, order management systems, and can include or converge on customer support systems. The data, being readily accessible, allows call center agents to access all the customer information they need from a single platform, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies.

CMDM can also help call center operations reduce costs by consolidating customer data in one platform, call center operations can reduce the need for manual data entry and reconciliation, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. CMDM should also help to identify duplicate or incomplete customer records, which can lead to reduced mailing costs and improved customer targeting.

A CMDM like that offered by Pretectum, is also critical for compliance and data security.With call center operations being subject to strict regulatory requirements, such as GDPR and HIPAA and various privacy acts across the world, a Customer focused MDM can help call center operations ensure compliance with these regulations by having just one source for Subject Access Requests (SARs) as well as being a centralized platform for managing customer data and enforcing data security policies.

CMDM like that offered by Pretectum distinguishes itself from multidomain MDM, CMDP, CDP, and CRM in a number of key ways. Multidomain MDM focuses on managing data across multiple domains, such as product, location, and also customer but the approach is homogenous and generic with minimal special capabilities unique to consumer customer records. CMDP is a data integration platform that helps organizations to consolidate data from multiple sources, a CMDM may or may not support interweaving sources - the Pretectum CMDM does. CDP is a marketing technology that helps organizations to personalize marketing campaigns so the focus is outbound communications where customers may exist in multiple forms in the platform. CRM is a customer relationship management system that principally focuses on transactional interactions with customers, the focus is not on customers so much as ensuring that you can sell to them and track interactions. While these technologies are related to CMDM, they have different purposes and focus on different aspects of customer data management.

CMDM like that offered by Pretectum, can serve as the central hub for managing customer data in call center operations. It provides a single source of truth for customer data, improving the accuracy, completeness, and consistency of customer data across all systems and applications. It enables call center agents to access all the customer information they need from a single platform, reducing the risk of errors and inconsistencies. CMDM also helps call center operations reduce costs, ensure compliance and data security, and make informed decisions about business processes and customer service strategies.

CMDMs are critical components of a successful call center operation. They ensure that customer data is consistently accurate, complete, and up-to-date, and is available to all stakeholders who need it. The Pretectum CMDM serves as the central hub for managing customer data in call center solutions and applications that need a single source of truth that is centrally managed. Call center operations that implement CMDM can improve customer service, reduce costs, ensure compliance and data

Publish Date: March 25, 2023 1:26 AM

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When a customer has a moment of truth

There are make-or-break events that litter the narrative of our lives, events that we might call ‘moments of truth’.

These are situations where people’s actions, intellect and capability are put to the test, where key decisions or actions change the course of the future. Some of them involve split-second decision-making, and others are deliberated before a final decision is made.

For marketers and associates in customer-facing situations, that ‘moment of truth‘ has a similar meaning, the occasion where customer interaction is so impactful that it alters the customer’s disposition and perception of the brand.

This alteration can forever change the relationship between the brand and the customer, for better or worse.

Focusing on the ‘moments of truth‘ ultimately means spending time and effort on the most valuable aspects of the customer journey and focusing on the moments that truly matter.

The term ‘moment of truth’ is a translation of the Spanish el momento de la verdad, which signifies the time in a bullfight in which the matador is about to ceremoniously kill the bull.

It is a bit gruesome but it was first described in English by Ernest Hemingway in his story Death in the Afternoon, published in 1932, and subsequently was transferred to other critical outcomes. The term was first coined for use in marketing by AG Lafley, former Chairman, President and CEO of Procter & Gamble (P&G) in 2005 when he claimed there were two moments of truth. A third was later added later by Pete Blackshaw – another P&G alumnus.

• The first moment of truth is when a customer first encounters a product or service. This is when marketers, brand promoters and representatives have the opportunity to convince the customer to buy their goods instead of another’s.
• The second moment of truth comes after the purchase and hinges on the discovery of full alignment or misalignment of the product or service in relation to their expectations or problem to solve.
• The third moment of truth is the tipping point of advocacy where the customer actually becomes a net promoter.

McKinsey & Co considers the moment of truth in customer service as any time when a person invests a “high amount of emotional energy” in a particular outcome in relation to brand interaction. It follows then, that when emotions are running high, so are the stakes for a given brand. Genuine emotional connections are critical in the journey and these can result in a sink or swim outcome.

Fostering loyalty

As many as a third of customers will abandon a loved brand after just one bad customer experience. Almost three-quarters of consumers will ghost a brand after three or fewer negative customer service experiences per a Coveo survey cited by retail dive. A more recent TCN’s “Consumer Insights about Customer Service” survey claims 66% of Americans are likely to abandon a brand after a poor customer service experience

Banking industry research shows similar consumer behaviour with 15% of customers who had negative experiences during a moment of truth switching banks soon after. 20% more stopped using specific products and almost a quarter began buying services from another provider, even if they stayed with their current one. Almost three-quarters actively changed their relationship with their bank in a negative way.

Of course, as expected, ‘positive’ moments of truth have the opposite effect.

As few as 13% are inert after a great moment of truth experience, so from this we can infer that moments of truth inspire customers to take action – the kind of action they take depends on the quality of the encounter or interaction.

Not every interaction with a customer is going to result in an emotional outcome, reporting lost bank cards, querying suspicious transactions or asking about other inquiring about other banking products or services are quite normal. They tend to be high touch and involve a lot of emotional investment from the customer. The way they feel treated and the final outcome of the interaction leaves them with a positive, negative or neutral disposition.

On the flip side, the purchase of a bagel or a cup of coffee might not be that big of a deal for some, though it may be a ritual for a coffee shop customer. Buying flowers or a bouquet for delivery could go either way depending on the nature of the event and the quality of the outcome. You have to assess the likelihood of high emotional investment and determine whether it is likely to be there and behave and act accordingly.

Ultimately, most customers simply want proactive communication appropriate to their relationship with the brand, a sense of caring, and responsiveness amongst frontline staff with a knowledge of their history.

Empowering employees to be flexible in their engagement is best achieved by providing data that provides the associate with customer insights on the fly.

In the end, people want friendly, empathetic and personalised service. Pretectum believes that one of the easiest ways to enable your teams for positive moments of truth is by providing them with access to as many insights and data points about the customer as possible.

This can be via direct access to the Customer Master Data Management systems (CMDM) or it can be achieved through the use of API integration with theCMDM SaaS platform from your service, sales and support applications.

Publish Date: November 1, 2022 3:06 AM

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A new age for Mobile and Fixed Line Telephone Networks

In a saturated telecoms market, fixed-line carriers have a hard position. They are fighting battles on many fronts, trying to displace newcomers competing with the mobile carriers and in some countries even suffering piggyback fixed-line phone carriers that are emerging thanks to deregulation and the dismantling of legacy governmental phone carrier service mandates and monopolies.

The winners in this fight are going to be those carriers who bring compelling propositions to their customer base that are relevant and competitively priced. Mobile is estimated to have reached 8.65 billion subscriptions while fixed lines sit at around 884 Million accompanied by about 1.3Bn broadband subscriptions.

The situation for all carriers is now exacerbated by another emergent, namely MVNOs.

Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) are now more commonplace and growing in both their domestic and commercial client base and also in terms of the sophistication of their offerings.

MVNO subscriber bases grow as a result of heavily discounted and even subsidized tariffs for new customers and low fixed fees accompanied by relatively low operational overheads due to the presence of existing wireless and fixed-line networks.

The combo offers from MVNOs include SIM-free subscriptions and pay-as-you-go models accompanied by offers of broadband, TV, insurance and utilities. For the consumer, it’s a great opportunity to benefit from lower prices for what are now largely considered commodity services. With social media bundles, data sharing bundles, and multi-service bundles telecom operators are having a tough time competing on the old terms of reliability, responsiveness and tariff.

The plethora of VoIP services offered by social media networks and others are also outgunning the telecom operators who would have previously harvested a significant amount of revenue from long-distance and peak-hour call rates.

What are the existing carriers to do?

It is important to understand a couple of important things about the modern consumer. Firstly, research suggests that more than half (62%) prefer human contact in customer support but that roughly the same number (67%) automatically expect there to be access to digital channels.

Responsiveness matters, and most importantly the people who engage with them need to demonstrate knowledge and competency (69%). For call centre operators this comes as no surprise, the most successful agents are those that consistently attain high-performance standards, are empathic to customers’ concerns and have good comprehension and understanding – customer history must be known or readily accessible and of course, associates must be welcoming, approachable and friendly.

Telcos are generally viewed as losing touch with their existing customer base and failing to evolve with the needs of busy, demanding and digitally oriented customers. Even customer priorities are changing – timeliness and efficiency in performing transactions are now simply table stakes.

Customers want all their service options and current obligations to be simple to explore, use and pay for. Consumers are looking for a digital-first experience – one that allows them to navigate seamlessly between online and offline channels with personalization in attendance all the way.

Your organization doesn’t need to be a ‘high-tech’ Silicon Valley startup to benefit from innovative technologies that get you closer to your customers, having a digital company mindset is simply a mode of operations. The main focus has to be how your business interacts, transact and enacts its business through digital channels.

Taking electronic payments, ordering, self-service line portfolio changes, checking inventory, checking appointment slots and line availability could be done with a service representative on a call, old school style but if you enable self-service you not only free up manpower you empower the customer. If you’re still using mailing lists, courier delivery services or have an electronic loyalty card do your POS devices or cash registers in physical retail or service stores log transactions that provide you with a unified view and understanding of the customer? Very often, it has been seen that the relationship between systems is disconnected and disjointed leading to confusion about the customer and the customer relationship.

Wholly digital companies have set the new standard for personalized, simple and digital experiences, and customers expect the same from telecom providers.

Nearly every business runs parallel activities through digital channels if you are not you are falling behind. If your organization, as a telecom operator is not doing exactly the same you will see churn and stagnant growth. You have the subscriber base, and you have the data, why aren’t you making better use of it?

SaaS-based Customer Master Data Management platforms support telecom operators in deriving a single view of the customer record with as much complexity or simplicity as circumstances demand. 

Publish Date: November 1, 2022 3:00 AM

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Good customer analytics starts with good data

Consumer data helps companies a great deal to improve nearly every aspect of their business. With proper data analytics and a data-driven marketing approach, brands are able to gain actionable customer insights, generate quality leads and increase customer loyalty, among other things.

According to a survey done by Harvard Business Review, 58% of enterprises have experienced a hike in customer retention and loyalty by making the right use of customer analytics. 

Elevating the quality of your customer data can benefit your business in a number of ways and here are a few thoughts on aspects you might want to consider:

The enhanced customer experience (CX): There is evidence to suggest that businesses that are customer-centric tend to be way ahead of their competitors. To follow a customer-driven approach, you need access to comprehensive customer-specific data. The gathered and enhanced customer data can be useful in being able to understanding and predicting customer behaviour which in turn can be used to improve customer experience through customized offerings, messaging, interaction and services. Without the data, it is hard to provide anything more than a generic message or offer which may not resonate.

Precise targeting and lead generation accompanied with a lower CAC: Effective marketing can translate into a shorter sales cycle, greater sales volume, or appeal to a wider customer audience. For a marketing campaign to be effective though, it needs to have good data to support the estimation of the potential target market or market segment. Having good customer data opens up the opportunity to segment based on customer demographics, showing where the customers are, their age group, their gender, education, likely income, potential disposable income, and other critical traits that you might consider for targeting.

Drawing customers in for multiple engagements or appealing to new customers is made more likely with comprehensive and correct customer data that allow your business to focus on customer-characteristic-based marketing strategies to generate quality leads.

According to Thomas Griffin Co-Founder and President of OptinMonster in a piece on Forbes – customer acquisition cost (CAC) can be lowered if you have the right targeted message aimed at the right audience, whether it be PPC or contact-based marketing campaigns. To have that message, you need to know something about your audience, particularly if you’re running contact-based campaigns

Brand Improvement: Customer feedback and reviews form an important part of customer data but for this kind of data to be really useful, it needs to be tied to the best possible customer master data. To run effective customer review and survey data analytics you want to be able to paint a complete picture of respondents. Survey submissions that support uncovering the strengths and weaknesses of your brand and offerings can be effective in isolation by conveying a sense of general measures of customer satisfaction but they ultimately reduce their usefulness without reference to customer data.

Survey responses may impair your ability to derive maximum value from responses by being unable to tie them back to the respondent’s lifetime customer value. The CLV model informs you on whether the commenting customers are actually high-value customers or one-off customers who bought on a deal or opportunistically and that may never buy from you again.

Tools matter: we’ve talked about tools before, principally tools like your Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution where you store large amounts of data and consumer profiles. You may even have an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system or a CDM (Customer Data Management) platform. Your business may in fact have all of these., but the question of whether they are fit for purpose or suitable for all the jobs that your business needs to undertake needs to be carefully considered.

We’ve observed that there is a lot of enthusiasm about using AI for data collection accompanied by scraping tools and social media trawlers and transaction aggregators to increase the volume of data collected.  What we’ve also observed is that some of the fundamentals of knowing your customer remain missing or incomplete. This is partially due to poor data collection, collation, and assessment processes but it is also a function of the nature of the tools. Some tools are better suited to transaction processing, interaction or engagement, etc. Very few of the tools that we’ve mentioned, are suited to mastery of the digital customer and if they are, it is typically in the service of a specific application objective.

Customer data is presently experiencing a revolution in the business world. Data for every kind of business, from B2B sales and eCommerce brands to digital content creators, service and hospitality, healthcare and financial services, and a number of others too. All depend on gaining a source of appropriate and correct customer data to increase their leads, opportunities, and ultimately business., Knowing the audience, creating personalized marketing strategies, generating quality leads, and reaching a wider audience is the brass ring that leads to business success.

There is no exaggeration in saying that in today’s world of digital advancement, your company cannot survive without the best possible proper and relevant customer data.

You can achieve that with a Customer Master Data Management (CMDM) platform like that offered by Pretectum.

 

Publish Date: September 23, 2022 2:05 AM

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Calculating the value of customers

The monetary value of a customer relationship is important in understanding how much you might choose to spend on acquiring a customer or how much you might choose to invest in a customer acquisition strategy over time.

82% of companies agree that retention is cheaper than acquisition and some three-quarters of consumers say they prefer brands that offer them rewards for their loyalty.

Just over half of customers claim that they stay loyal to those brands that relate most closely to them and 65% of most brands’ business comes from existing customers so it comes as no surprise that working out what those customers cost you to acquire and what it takes to retain them should be an important focus of what your organization does. All of this is encapsulated in the Customer Lifetime Value or CLV concept.

What is the average customer retention rate?

Customer Retention Rate (CRR) by Industry is variable, in Retail this tends to be around 63%, in Banking, 75% and in Telecom 78%.

However, churn (customer switching) is becoming increasingly commonplace in the telecom and banking sectors due to the more open approaches to doing business and the advocacy for consumers through initiatives like “open banking” and “number portability”.

In the perfect world, you would see 100% customer retention, where the products and services that you offer are uniquely distinguishable from those of others, such that they are considered indispensable and non-displaceable by competing brands. Where monopolies exist or where the difference between your brand and the next best competitor is massive, you may find that close to 100% retention is achievable. Retention above 90% is exceptional and retention above 75% is considered very good. Retention below 25% is not very good verging on bad or terrible.

It is important to measure retention nonetheless because the longer you can retain the customer the cheaper the acquisition costs and the higher the customer’s lifetime value.

Retention translates to customer loyalty and should be a Key Performance Indicator that determines whether your products and customer loyalty strategies are effective.

So just how would you calculate your customer retention rate?

Start with counting the total number of customers you have at the end of a time period (month, quarter, or year) – the Pretectum CMDM can be an aide in doing this. Next, subtract the number of new customers you acquired in the same period, here too, you could use the Pretectum CMDM to do this. Next, divide the remaining number by the number of customers you had at the start of the period.

Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is influenced by many factors, it has been found that the most loyal customers associate positive experiences they have with the brand or company with sustained and recurrent purchases. They may also be observed to have higher conversions (visits that result in a sale) and higher overall spending (higher event value).

Keeping customers happy and inducing them to return for more is vital to the success of any business. So, higher profitability often begins with existing customers. Repeat customers not only spend more money on a more frequent basis, but they also assist to increase the number of new consumers that come through your doors through recommendations and brand promotion. As a result, it is critical to maintaining a high customer retention rate (CRR).

Pretectum believes that one of the best ways to promote a high CRR and establish the highest possible CLV is through interaction personalization and a closely curated relationship with the customer.

This means knowing who your customers are, what their preferences are and conveying to them a disposition of caring and genuine knowledge about them and their circumstances and relationship with your brand or business. This relationship-building is best achieved through appropriately comprehensive and correct customer master data.

 

 

Publish Date: June 13, 2022 6:19 AM

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Customer Master Data should matter to you

It has been suggested that companies that do not understand the importance of customer data management are less likely to survive in a post-pandemic modern economy.

Your customer data could be your business’s most valuable asset. But there are a few things to consider if your intentions are, to create a truly data-focused organization.

Pretectum feels that data is foundational for building business information.

They see it as essential for creating customer knowledge, and ultimately the driving force behind correct tactical and strategic decisions and business actions like optimizing your call center operations.

If your customer data is relevant, complete, accurate, meaningful, and actionable, it then becomes instrumental in driving the growth of the organization. If it has deficiencies it can prove to be a useless and even a harmful inhibitor to not just growth, but also business sustainment.

Customer data management initiatives should be put into play to systematically create and maintain customer master data and increase the organizational potential and these should focus on quality and control.

The most successful organizations manage their customer data cycle well by managing the way customer data is created, stored, maintained, used, and retired.

When customer data management is truly managed effectively, the customer data life cycle commences even before any customer data is acquired.

Data management as a discipline, is the function of planning, controlling, and delivering data effectively in any organization and includes practicing a discipline in the development, execution, and supervision of plans, programs, policies, and practices that protect, control, deliver and enhance the quality and value of data and information in the organization.

Risk mitigation

Not only is there an expectation as a result of privacy and compliance, but there is also the question of business reputation. Any organization that fails to maintain and assess its customer master data can be subject to non-compliance prosection or personal litigation. Security of customer master data is therefore very important and proper and appropriate data management helps in making sure that data is never accessed in an inappropriate or unauthorized way and is protected inside the organization. Data security is an essential part of data management and Pretectum takes pride in the fact that it uses the latest methods and techniques to ensure that customer data remains secure and protected but is still able to be used by the business as required.

Making use of a modern cloud platform like the Pretectum C-MDM protects not only the integrity of the data but also provides assurance to employees and companies that data loss, data breaches, and data thefts are less likely.

Effective data quality

There should be little doubt that a structured and planned approach to customer data collection, curation, and review, will lead to better data quality. Improvements to data management practice, however, do need to be considered as something progressive. It is rarely possible to simply implement a software solution and expect there to be an immediate change in the status of your customer master data. There likely needs to be a rethink of all the participants in the data management process, an evaluation of roles and responsibilities, and the establishment of some data quality measures. This is typically covered by a digital transformation project but can also be driven by a data management organization that functions at a level of maturity despite perhaps making use of largely manual controls, processes, and methods.

After the implementation of a platform like the Pretectum C-MDM, your business will see improved data management which in turn will help in improving data quality and data access. For the business as a whole, this often translates into less friction in engaging with customers and improved decision-making even at the call center agent level!

Doing things right is doing things better…

Peter Drucker is quoted as having said “Efficiency is doing better what is already being done“. At Pretectum the feeling is that there must be a better way to manage your customer data and that, data managed properly, updated, enhanced, and made accessible, will enhance organizational efficiency. Conversely, inaccurate, mismanaged data will waste precious time and resources.

Eliminate errors, eliminate waste…

Only through effective customer data management will you minimize the occurrence of errors and reduce the damage that bad master data can cause. Transcription, poor integration, and legacy methods used for capturing customer data introduce a greater likelihood of customer master data errors. With centralized customer master data management underpinned by data validation and data quality, your business has the best chance at creating and retaining the most valuable business data asset – your customer master.

Publish Date: March 23, 2022 6:53 PM

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CUSTOMER MDM

Considering the alternatives

Data quality and consistency should not be neglected, market research suggests that poor quality, data redundancy, and data inconsistency are what most businesses struggle with on a daily basis. Customer data says Pretectum, is amongst the most common of the data that represent challenges to marketing, sales, service, support and billing, and collections functions. There has never been a better time to implement a more disciplined approach to customer data management than today!

Customer Master data management (“CMDM”) itself is the convergence of people process and technology to maintain a disciplined approach to the definition, creation, maintenance, and distribution of customer data. Customers can be consumers or businesses and when you consider consumer customers these encompass those that visit a brick and mortar stores and locations as well as those that your business engages with via eCommerce or via phone, mail, or home visits.

The discipline of master data management as a whole is an element of data governance which in turn is an element of business information management.

Although MDM has historically been the exclusive domain of specialized data groups and IT.

The Pretectum C-MDM platform view is that master data management and Customer MDM in particular, as an area of data management, cannot be realistically managed and controlled by technologists and IT.

Instead, we view it as something that should be controlled and managed by business data managers and stakeholders

Any Customer MDM seeks to ensure there is uniformity, accuracy, semantic consistency, controls, and accountability of the organizational customer master data. There should be the expectation that the data is to be used by multiple groups with different needs and expectations in relation to that data.

A typical set of traits in your customer master data management system should provide infrastructure, methods, and processes in support of the following key activities:

• Business Area partitioning
• Multi-user role and team definition
• Metadata definitions of one or more customer master object(s)
• Metadata definitions of the key attributes and what are acceptable data types and values
• Definition of a semantic data model and classifiers
• Definitions and mechanisms to support data governance procedures
• The collection of master data in a central repository via manual entry & automation
• Data maintenance processes including data quality and statistical reporting
• Provision of the master data to systems and stakeholders manually & via automation

What about machine learning and artificial intelligence?

While the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning is advantageous and can prove to be accelerators in the implementation and adoption of any MDM, these are technical approaches to ensuring the efficacy of data governance and data management where the processes policies and procedures are clearly defined.

The presence of AI and ML should not be mistakenly considered a prerequisite for MDM particularly if there is a low level of organization data governance maturity or where the business is nascent in it’s data governance program.

Pretectum C-MDM comes with AI and ML but it is not necessarily technology that is suited for every kind of scenario. The Pretectum C-MDM provides businesses with a single source of the core customer data that you define, in one or more ways, for use across the entire organization. This centrally trustable and governed data repository helps businesses to gain valuable insights and engage in better decision-making.

What do I get from implementing MDM?

As a business, implementing a master data management program in support of the customer master will bring a great many hidden and obvious business benefits, among these your business should expect:

• Reduced or eliminated poor quality data and duplicates which leads to improved speed in identifying customers and maximizing your understanding of those customers
• More effective customer prioritization and reduced friction and the likelihood of mistaken identity when interacting with customers.
• Improve confidence in customer interaction opportunities and a likely higher yield from targeted customer event-based activities.
• Improved decision-making across all divisions and improved value from existing and new data assets

To achieve the best results, in considering an MDM for the customer, it is essential to assess your overall business goals and examine your business data priorities in particular. Your customer master may not be your main priority, the main priority may lie in inventory management, your product catalog, or some other area of your business.

If you identify that you have a high degree of issues with your customer data, consider what your business is missing in terms of opportunities and determine what you consider would be success criteria for any initiative that you would implement in pursuit of improved data governance and in particular, the implementation of a Customer Master Data Management program.

Pretectum C-MDM is a power platform focused on the customer.

From instantiation through onboarding, data maintenance, and data syndication; businesses will adopt and get desirable results from leveraging Pretectum C-MDM in improving the overall performance of the data governance program using the platform’s customer data specialism.

 

Publish Date: March 11, 2022 3:31 AM

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CONSUMER LOYALTY AND CUSTOMER MASTER DATA

Pretectum previously mentioned how some airlines leveraged their loyalty programs to secure loans from various backers. At face value, this tells you that though we as consumers store value in our reward points or air miles, so do the airlines and retailers themselves!

Customer loyalty programs like Airmiles and rewards are forged relationships between brands and customers. This is one of the reasons that when a rewards or loyalty program changes the terms and conditions of the relationship, sometimes you will see a sharp uptick or drop-off in the use or support of that program. Launching a loyalty program is also expensive and complex.

In the US alone, companies spend a staggering $2 billion on loyalty programs every year according to Capgemini.

Typically loyalty programs serve as a way for the brand to offer membership-related exclusive products, promotions, or pricing. The reciprocated offer from the customer is their agreement to sustain the relationship with preference against that product line or service through repeat purchases or brand engagement.

In a nutshell, a loyalty program is another marketing mix element. A part of any marketing strategy Loyalty Programs is designed to encourage customers to sustain their shopping or use the services of a business associated with the brand and program.

Loyalty programs cover most types of commerce, each having different features and rewards. Industry segments that have leveraged broad loyalty programs include financial credit, hospitality & travel, retail and entertainment.

According to Sallie Burnett, a loyalty consultant and Founder of Customer Insight Group. in a Forbes article, one of the most successful loyalty program examples is that of Nordstrom retail stores. Nordstrom customers move up through levels from Member to Insider, Influencer and Ambassador.

Annex Cloud a loyalty experience solution suggests however that not all loyalty programs are a guarantee of success. Annex Cloud cite, a report by Capgemini wherein a high percentage of loyalty programs are considered to be failing.

53% of consumers stated that they abandoned at least one loyalty program within the last year which means businesses are putting money and energy into strategies that aren’t being successful. The main reasons vary, from a lack of reward relevance, flexibility, and value (44%) through a lack of a seamless multi-channel experience (33%) to customer service issues (17%).

Pretectum feels that one of the ways to mitigate some of the aspects of customer service and multi-channel interaction is through the convergence on a single-source-of-truth in relation to the customer master. If your sales, service, support and loyalty programs are all reading from the same song-sheet, a centralized customer master data hub, then the ability to service the same message consistently and coherently is greatly improved. This in turn leads to a greater likelihood of retention.

Here are some interesting statistics in relation to loyalty programs and the customer relationship.

82% of companies say retention is cheaper than acquisition.
75% of consumers say they prefer brands that offer rewards.
56% of customers stay loyal to brands that “get them”
58% of companies use personalization to retain customers

Publish Date: March 9, 2022 10:44 AM

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The Gen Z customer and brands

The Gen Z customer and brands

Publish Date: February 23, 2022 8:29 AM

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Why you may want to obsess about customer data management today

Over the years, many businesses have successfully held onto a loyal customer base while generating new relationships with new customers and retaining them through optimized and appropriate customer relationship management.

Oftentimes, this formation and retention of customer relations have been heavily tied not just to the brand and the products and services but also through how that business has managed customer data.

Interestingly, even businesses that have adopted customer data management are not necessarily household names and brands that you might recognize but they’ve still been able to stay in business sometimes in a multi-generational way because they work hard on building and maintaining the customer relationship and are leveraging data to do it.

Times have changed and often it may seem really hard to do business with customers in the way it used to be. At face value that means that only the strongest brands might survive. This doesn’t have to be true though, what this does mean though, is that now more than ever, businesses need to not only adapt the way that they think about the customer but in particular how they consider customer data management. They need to obsess about it because the competitive game of business around them has changed from something that perhaps seemed easy, to a more advanced level. Businesses that still want to play easy would be at risk of facing an imminent game over.

“Old habits die hard” – the bad ones need to be killed off with persistence.

Fewer than 200,000 businesses in the United States may have failed during the first year of the COVID-19 but the final tally may be higher than thought given the subsequent waves of the Delta and Omicron variants.

Business failures often stem from misalignment between the unique resources and capabilities of the organization and the demands of the new business environment and data can be one of the greatest resources that help inform your business.

COVID-19 certainly introduced a number of aspects to the way businesses work, that changed a lot of the face-to-face personal experience for retailers but it also changed things for the bespoke and custom apparel sector. The pandemic did a pretty good job at slowly killing consumer purchasing habits and behavioral patterns in particular until there is barely anything left to even be cremated!

The global pandemic has greatly impacted businesses in all industry segments in all geographies and has forced us to rethink how we work, travel, communicate and shop. This change in old habits has affected businesses, both big and small. Very few escaped unscathed in some way.

Before the covid-19 pandemic, local businesses had regular operating hours, the notion of walk-ups into a physical store to purchase items would have been considered commonplace.

When the pandemic hit, our physical movement became restricted, safety became a priority, walk-ups instead became queue ups. Consumers started accelerating their migration to the virtual world, increasing their digital adoption, instead of going to the store physically, they would go to the store online.

E-commerce continued to experience strong growth, rising to about 30% year on year. Shopping for more basic needs like food, sanitary, nose masks, and other products related to the pandemic went on the rise, and purchasing less and less from travel sites and agencies, car insurance, and outdoor entertainment. The automobile industry remained strong, perhaps in part because of changes in disposable income and a refocus on the personal asset base.

Surveys found that consumers in several regions shifted more to value-based purchasing, which prioritizes obtaining maximum value for the consumer for the money spent.  eCommerce facilitated shopping around too.

In short, consumers started settling for new patterns of behavior in response to the multiple waves of the pandemic, something we can likely expect to persist. As a result of these rapid, yet continuous and unpredictable changes, customer data that businesses held in their various systems became less accurate and potentially more inconsistent as customers’ behavior continued to change. The result? Ultimately if your business is using data to make decisions the customer experience may be poorer if the understanding of the customer hasn’t changed with the changed context.

Fear and risk of infection will fade over time, but when exactly that will be, we cannot be sure. In the meantime, as consumers potentially ease back into their old ways, habits, behavior, purchasing patterns, your business should remain aggressively resolved to support the current and present environment, the old and the new. All of that is going require you to have the best possible customer data in order to successfully satisfy your customer’s needs in a sustained way. You could continue to just play easy if you have been resting on your laurels waiting for better days, but that’s a risky proposition in the longer term.

It’s been a long rough ride for business in general but some have weathered the storm because they have adapted or already had a robust customer data profile in place ahead of the pandemic. You’d agree, that now more than ever, your business needs to obsess about their customer data management because your business is planning to stick around. Surviving in the game depends on that data.

So far, businesses that have adopted customer data management, have been able to meet customers’ expectations to the maximum extent possible and they’re in a better position to retain such ones even during the post-pandemic era.

Now, is the time to secure your customer’s confidence and loyalty, and what better way to achieve that if not by your customer data management. Pretectum believes it has the perfect customer data management solution to support your business in the journey. Using a hub and spoke approach to data management means that your existing systems can remain intact but leverage a central source of truth to drive improved insights and decisions.

Publish Date: February 22, 2022 3:54 AM

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DATA GOVERNANCE: MASTER DATA IS BUT ONE FACET

Here is an outline of some facets of a robust data governance program that you might want to consider as part of your overarching approach to customer master data management.

Start with goals and strategy

Publish Date: January 4, 2022 11:00 PM

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Call Centres and Customer Data Management

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to be a make or break experience for call centres.

Not only was there an increase in calls but there was also a significant increase in the rate of difficult calls and the need to escalate them. That’s at least according to a 2020 study by Harvard Business Review. Difficult calls increased by 50% overall.

Customer service employees, therefore, had to deal with more calls and more complexity in the calls and were further challenged with having to go into under-manned call centres due to social distancing measures or were having to work from home too.

NBC and Telemundo survey respondents suggested that work conditions had worsened during the pandemic and more than half of callers were unable to resolve their issues.

Several issues were identified in an article as particularly problematic

• Protracted Call Wait Times
• Continued WFH circumstances
• Call centre agent recruitment and retention
• Low customer satisfaction

Solutions

There is no single bullet that will solve all of these issues but it can certainly be argued that data probably represents one of the key aspects of how call centres engage with customers that could help.

Companies that rely on call centres for customer interaction have the opportunity to consider how they deal with customer master data in particular and how that can be aligned and integrated with call centre operations.

In the current era, a call centre that can’t identify, queue and prioritize a customer based on CLI is missing a trick in prioritizing higher-value or even known customers. To do that of course requires the orchestration of integration of the CLI with the CRM or CIC software and in all likelihood a customer MDM (Master Data Management) system like the Pretectum C-MDM. Of course, there is always the risk that the number from which the caller is dialling is unknown or blocked but surely when the number is known or identified, there is value in leveraging that information in queue management.

WFH (Work from Home) is quite possibly the new normal. We’ve seen the progressive transition to telework wax and wane over the past quarter-century as networking and telecommunications infrastructure has improved but these days most people who would be office-bound or work in a call centre; likely have fairly good broadband access where they live and even the costs of teleworking equipment now make this a much more affordable option than it was in the past. Call centre heavy business will have their eye on the ball here and be looking to enhance and improve the ability of their staff to work from home and the technology and infrastructure shouldn’t be a hindrance in achieving this.

Recruitment and staff attrition is a thorny subject because some individuals thrive on the social interaction associated with actually working in an office and might not cope as well in WFH from home circumstances. However, if your business has coordinated the elements of WFH and yet allow hybrid working approaches say where those who really want to divorce home life from work life can, then it becomes possible for staff to still achieve their top line work objectives and still have a work-life balance that they feel is acceptable. Give them access to the right levels of data that give them the feeling that they are empowered to actually help customers, and retention becomes less of an issue because staff are likely to appreciate the ability to work where they want in the circumstances that they prefer.

Finally, if you manage to orchestrate the best implementation approach for call queuing; provide staff with all the necessary customer data via your MDM integration with CIC and CRM that helps them be the best that they can be, in their jobs and then augment their lifestyle with the ability to work where and how they prefer it is likely that preferred existing and new customers won’t have to wait so long to have their calls answered; will be responded to by staff with some existing knowledge and insight about the customer and are likely to help solve issues faster and with improved success rates.

Publish Date: December 8, 2021 2:38 AM

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The importance of customer data

The significance of the underlying data of our daily lives seems never more important than it is today. The rebranding of Facebook as a new entity called "Meta" seems to bear this out. In some sort of second-life like realm, we may well be represented beyond the simplicity of the online presence that we have today. The future is likely to be wholly immersive, and possibly quite possibly dystopian.

One can only imagine what the likes of George Orwell, Aldous Huxley and HG Wells would make of it all. It's hard to imagine ten years ago what we have and leverage today in trying to maintain a digital relationship with our customers.

There's a call for us to unsubscribe from social media, grade our social media in terms of privacy and social responsibility and to uninstall Google Chrome and while this is all very well, the reality is that if you're on the buy-sell side of consumer data this is not a good situation at all. The battening down of hatches by Apple, Facebook and Google ecosystems ahead of the 3rd party cookie crumble  doesn't bode well for the future good understanding of the customer without marrying one's strategy to one or all three of these behemoths.

Interestingly, it also doesn't matter if you are selling to other businesses or Joe Public. All the data essential for companies to shape customized experiences and offering which you had hoped would set the stage for innovation have now been put in jeopardy as a result of privacy concerns. If the individual you want to promote your business or products to, doesn't buy into your holding and handling of their data then it will be a rocky road ahead.

Taking aim

The number one objective in the future, and even today, is going to be ensuring that the data assets that you have are in the best possible shape and that they are appropriately yours and suitably managed for optimized targeting.

With tightened marketing budgets, there will be the expectation that you should sweat the existing data assets more, and spend even less on advertising. A mentality of "make the most" of what you already have.

As a consequence, businesses are focusing all their energy on their data. Data that is harvested from existing activities, should be tweaked and adjusted and then reexamined to derive insights for the next round of activity.

There are many tools available to help with this, but at the core of it all lies the need to consider the mastery of the customer record itself. Whether that mastery is done inhouse, outsourced or crowdsourced shouldn't really be much of a concern. What should be of concern is how current that data is and whether it has enough attributes to be useful.

Returning to that constrained marketing budget, you only want to likely target people who are interested in what you have to offer, but how will you optimally do that?

Playing to an audience

Through the elaboration of personas it is possible for every business to understand their optimal customer both as a consumer, user and buyer of their goods or services. While this is typically a product and product marketing function it could also be a pure marketing focus depending on the nature of the business. Understanding what the Jobs to be Done are and understanding who the products and services are targeted at will help you in segmenting the people whose data you have and understanding feature form and function that aligns with their needs, expectations and pocket-book.

The most appropriate data in your systems of record will allow you to hone and refine your message and help to ensure that you are focused on exactly the right audience. It shouldn't be underestimated how many businesses waste precious marketing dollars on targeting people who have little interest in what they have on offer.

A brave new world

Huxley described how science and efficiency could neutralize emotions and individuality, where there are no lasting relationships. This is all exactly the opposite of what our businesses need. We want to use the science (of data) and leverage the most efficient ways to actually elicit emotion and target individualistic messages to form long lasting relationships.

Centralized master data management like that offered by SaaS and PaaS solutions like the Pretectum Customer MDM (C-MDM) suggest ways to gather data and new metrics to track B2C and even B2B relationships in a world of innovation around customer data. Technologies like these provide more ways to track and report key data to find a clear path to focus all business efforts on the right prospects and customers.

The main obstacle will be balancing customer privacy with the businesses need to know. Companies will need to avoid being intrusive and holding unconsented data. While a lot of this might be considered marketing issues, the reality is that everyone in the company is responsible for all the data . If you gather less data or show customers exactly what you contain in your systems as 'their' data then customers may decide to choose you for that transparency. The tradeoff may be that you have fewer records to work with, but only time will tell.

Where does your business stand on the right level of customer data to hold, and what is the quality of the data that you currently maintain and want to maintain?

My thanks to Uli Lokshin for his review of my piece and suggestions.

Publish Date: November 8, 2021 6:42 AM

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Digital transformation depends on effective customer data management

There has been an incredible amount of technological change that impacts our everyday lives. The advent of the internet, social media, mobile and more, have changed how customers interact with brands, hence the need for change from brands.

It is the need for that change, that drives effective digital transformation.  

Digital transformation can mean different things for different organizations. It can mean launching e-commerce or a mobile app. For some, it could be about improving the web experience.

Whether you’re already an online business that needs a transformation initiative to engage markets that have not been targeted or an offline brand that realizes that a negative digital brand experience can be damaging for customer experience, loyalty, and reputation, you’ll be considering some kind of digital transformation, even if you don’t refer to it as such.

One of the many goals of digital transformation is to create insights and data points that will improve the customer experience with the intent of increasing sales, loyalty, and brand advocacy. A defined data strategy works to connect all your data, online and offline and defines the steps needed for advanced digital transformation. 

You’ll need to keep in mind, though, that tools or platforms don’t automatically make for an effective digital data strategy.

Some 70% of all initaitives do not attain their intended goals, close to $900 billion has been witnessed in potential wastage as a result of initiative failures. So it’s not enough to simply say you’re going to implement a digital transformation. To yield results, you need a holistic transformation approach to identifying where the right digital tech is needed, fed with the right unified accessible data, accompanied by a clear data strategy. How could you possibly achieve this?

This is where customer data management could make a grand entrance. 

Customer Data Management, Benefits 

It is said, data is fuel for digital transformation initiatives. Superior customer data management, in particular, ensures the supply of that data fuel is enabled and activated. If your customer data is consistent, well managed, and directed to the right place, at scale and in real-time you have a better chance at achieving an all-around improved view of each customer. 

• A single source of truth– Your organization likely has several different systems that store different data. Without effective customer data management across these tools, you’ll be required to enter data manually, which oftentimes leads to data capture inconsistency. A customer name might be entered in a system in the format “CAMERON LEE” and in another system as “LEE CAMERON” – which one is correct? This kind of transposition inconsistency and possible errors, can lead to a lot of wasted time and a potentially poor customer experience, as you might end up sending multiple marketing emails to slightly different names, yet ultimately the same person. It is therefore important to converge on a single system model or a single source of truth where each customer data is managed centrally and shared or accessed by the surrounding systems. This ensures consistent, enriched, and up-to-date data information, no matter what system the customer data appears in. 
• 360-degree view of each customer– Customer data management can help build a 360-degree view of key business information about the customer to allow you to take full advantage of your organization’s data, for better business outcomes that include; 
• A compliant digital customer management strategy
• Optimized and correctly calculated lifetime customer value
• An improved and customized customer experience 
• Improved customer onboarding and retention management

If you adopt customer master data management, your business is likely to do better, statistically, it has been found that digitally mature firms are 26% more profitable than their peers, they generate 9% more revenue, and achieve 12% higher market valuations than other large firms in their industries.

Getting ahead in terms of improving your relationship with your customers and dominating the markets in which you operate requires effective customer master data management. Having the pole position at the start of the race allows you to get ahead of competitors. With an ever-evolving digital world, you don’t want to delay your execution plans until later, the time has never been riper to evaluate what a Customer MDM can do for your business today!

Publish Date: October 28, 2021 6:28 AM

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Customer Master Data Management in the Cloud

There’s nothing particularly exotic about cloud-based applications and the same is true of master data management solutions in the cloud.

The growth of cloud services, cloud data, and cloud usage continues unabated. We should expect, that as long as good internet connectivity infrastructure is available there will be a continued support for cloud based systems and in fact cloud based solution adoption should grow.

More and more organizations are adopting cloud computing infrastructure to afford greater business agility and get access to the best available technology of the time. The adoption of cloud infrastructure like CRM in the cloud not only holds the promise of improved business efficiency but also the benefits of improved economic value and ROI.

In most cases, cloud solutions are well architected, unencumbered by legacy technology problems and present themselves as having a lower cost of ownership and wide accessibility to business stakeholders.

Businesses have been slow on the uptake of cloud-based MDM though with Gartner estimating that only 6% of all the companies that they talk to, have cloud-based MDM solutions in use.

Cloud-based Customer MDM presents itself in the shape of software as a service (SaaS).

This means that organizations do not have to incur the cost of the hardware and the software associated with it and have no application or hardware maintenance to pay.They pay one fee according to the size of the usage profile that they have, either in terms of records, users or both.

The organizational and financial cost of provisioning on-premise and captive hardware is sometimes prohibitive enough for organizations to effectively ditch capital expenditure on a system and instead invest capital budgets elsewhere in the business. They might instead choose a "pay as you g(r)o(w)" model which a SaaS application will support.

One of the reasons Gartner’s observation of 6% of adoption may be so low, could be tied to the fact that there is remains some anxiety around the security of cloud-based systems and a reluctance to store sensitive proprietary data outside the company’s firewall.

Platforms like the Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and the Google Cloud Platform are deployed with the best resources available and a high degree of automation and monitoring.

Security is a top priority for these infrastructure providers in order to provide top tier companies and organizations across the globe, with the right level of secure and robust compute to meet their diverse needs.

Data hacking is regrettably a continuous threat but since the mid-2010’s on-premise system attacks due to inadequate software maintenance and control regimens have highly outnumbered the incidents of cloud attacks.

The cloud attacks themselves have had nothing to do with cloud security vulnerabilities, they have largely been as a result of poorly implemented data controls or internal bad players, so basically inside jobs.

Numerous customer relationship management (CRM), Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer data platforms (CDP) and marketing automation (MA) solutions are cloud-based. Most notably Salesforce CRM and NetSuite ERP are exclusively available as cloud solutions.

Cloud based MDM (Master Data Management) solutions are also available and these include well known solutions from Informatica, IBM, Oracle and SAP as well as newcomers like Pretectum C-MDM for customer master data management.

Cloud-based SaaS applications like the Pretectum C-MDM deliver new functionality on an almost continuous basis and for major changes, you can decide when to upgrade and avail your business of new functionality.

Upgrades are seamless and generally invisible to clients until they are actually completed.

Legacy versions are typically only supported for a limited time after the general availability of new functionality and enhancements to reduce the costs of operations support.

Your organization should therefore be prepared to move with upgrades as they become available to ensure that you are making use of the newest version of your customer MDM. Updated technology or newer infrastructure is available for use via the cloud in a completely transparent way.

In considering a cloud provider, remember that not all cloud providers offer cloud hosting outside the US.

This is important when considering Customer MDM particularly in the context of Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Also, consider that US safe harbor agreements are problematic with the storage and transferral of EU citizen data outside Europe.

If you are using on premise systems that contain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data then you may need to always store that data on-premise in the country of origin, this may represent an IT burden to your organization.

 

 

Publish Date: October 5, 2021 3:10 AM

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