As an organization’s business grows with their consumer base, customer data must be managed with proper discipline with the proper technologies. This is expounded when businesses require multiple source systems to manage their ever-expanding volume of customer and supplier data. With multiple points of data entry comes with data quality and data governance challenges. This is where coexistence MDMs aggregate master data from the various sources by cleansing, enriching, governing, and synchronizing golden record data back to the individual source systems. In this coexistence approach, MDM becomes a driver for both upstream systems and downstream operational activities.
Who is Impacted?
Catherine Yu lives in Texas and enjoys shopping at ACME’s clothing brand store. They sign up for the ACME Clothing’s customer loyalty program to take advantage of weekly discounts and exclusive sales. Catherine is also an avid do-it-yourself home improvement hobbyist and frequents ACME’s Home Improvement stores. Catherine decides to sign up for ACME Home Improvement’s customer loyalty program since it offers similar shopping perks that’s exclusive to this brand.
Sandra manages Catherine’s order from a B2C e-commerce site which contains no address validation, allows multiple accounts to be created for a single customer, and lacks any form of de-duplication of customer records. Lacking address validation leads to missed order deliveries which damages brand reputation. Allowing multiple customer accounts of a single record due to no deduplication leads to loss of cross sell opportunities as an email or sales catalog may be sent based off the information of an old account. Deduplicating and consolidating these records allow all contact information to be available on a single entity, eliminating errors caused by multiple conflicting entities
Charles Johnson, Catherine’s fiancé, is from Michigan and is an occasional shopper of ACME brand clothing. As a loyalty program member, Charles has decided to take advantage of recent promotions in preparation for their wedding. Upon marriage, Catherine has chosen to take Charles’ last name and moved to Michigan with Charles.
What is the Business Problem?
When Catherine becomes married and moves to Michigan, they not only took on a different last name but also a new address. Being a newlywed and living in a new house, Catherine decides to take on some DIY projects and frequents ACME Home Improvement. In order to gather their shoppers’ rewards points, Catherine updates their loyalty program profile to reflect their new address and last name.
ACME Clothing and ACME Home Improvement customer loyalty programs are managed by different CRM applications that are siloed with no synchronization between the two systems. Although Catherine initially enrolled in both programs under their maiden name and Texas address, ACME Corporation had no mechanism in place to identify and recognize that both records for Catherine were actually for the same customer. The situation is further complicated now that Catherine has updated their profile within one CRM with a different surname and address but not the other. This lack of data governance and management prevents ACME from realizing marketing and sales opportunities across brands, and even introduces unnecessary cost since ACME Clothing marketing ads and other collateral are still being erroneously mailed to the old Texas address.
Current Process
With multiple points of data entry in this process, supplier data is prone to duplicates across ERPs as well as incomplete and conflicting information being introduced. Furthermore, although data is synchronized from each ERP application to ACME’s reporting platform, there is no reliable process for aggregating customer data. Arthur cannot conduct validity checks and other governance measures required by the business; therefore, the reports that Arthur compiles and provides for downstream business operations are prone to inaccuracies.
Future Process
An MDM system can identify that Catherine Yu across the two CRMs is actually the same person and merge the two into a single golden record that is validated, standardized, and trusted. The synchronization of the golden record back to the CRMs ensures data is accurate and up to date at the source and any updates to the consumer record such as Catherine’s surname and address will also be validated, standardized, and synchronized across both CRMs with MDM as the hub.
This allows ACME’s marketing team to effectively identify with their consumer base with tailored marketing campaigns to maximize promotions and cross-sell opportunities across brands.