When organizations operate across multiple lines of business which focuses on different offerings and target consumer groups, it is often the case that each line of business is supported by siloed source systems. This presents a challenge as organizations strive to manage their customer data that are maintained in disparate systems yet may overlap from one line of business to another.
Having multiple points of data entry comes with data quality and data governance challenges such as data aggregation, cleansing, enrichment, governance, and synchronization. Coexistence MDM builds upon Consolidation MDM by synchronizing mastered customer data back to the source CRM applications. This ensures end users of these applications are presented with trusted, accurate, and up to date customer information.
Who is Impacted?
Miguel, Natalie, and Sophia are representatives on the sales team. They are each responsible for managing ACME customer data within the CRM applications that support each line of business.
Benny, also on the sales team, is responsible for compiling and analyzing reports for ACME’s retailers and distributors that have active contracts to resell and distribute ACME products.
What is the Business Problem?
ACME operates across multiple lines of business in which customers may do business with. Miquel, Natalie, and Sophia are updating existing customers and creating new customers within their respective lines of business on a daily basis. Since customer data for each line of business is maintained in disparate CRM applications which are not in sync with each other, the sales team may manage customer records in their respective CRMs that overlap with each other.
This situation presents a challenge for Benny as ACME frequently compiles sales reports for financial roll-ups that are integral to various operational processes such as strategizing for new sales and marketing campaigns, managing customer charge backs, customer segmentation analysis, etc.
Furthermore, due to this isolated landscape using silos, the lack of synchronization between the various CRMs present operational challenges. For example, a customer’s address may have been updated by Natalie within CRM for one line of business but remain outdated for Sophia as they works within CRM for another line of business. This may impact activities such as mailing invoices, business catalogs, or invitations to conferences and promotional events.
Current Process
With multiple points of data entry in this process, customer data is prone to duplicates across CRMs as well as incomplete and conflicting information being introduced. Furthermore, although data is synchronized from each CRM application to ACME’s reporting platform, there is no reliable process for aggregating customer data. Benny cannot conduct validity checks and other governance measures required by the business; therefore, the reports that they compile and provide for downstream business operations are prone to inaccuracies.
Since there is no synchronization between the three CRM applications, ACME’s sales team could be updating address information in one application will not be propagated to other applications, leading to incorrectly mailed invoices, catalogs, or invitations to industry conferences.
Future Process
An MDM solution will provide the CRM applications the means to preemptively search within MDM for customer records before new records are created in CRM. If the customer already exists based on minimal search parameters, MDM will provide the identifier of the record. If the customer does not exist in MDM, then Miguel, Natalie, and Sophia may proceed with creating the new record in CRM.
MDM will then aggregate customer data from the CRM source systems for all lines of business and automates business validations to ensure completeness and accuracy. In addition to sending the mastered customer data to downstream systems to facilitate other business operations, MDM will also send the mastered customer data back to upstream CRM source systems. This process ensures the synchronization of mastered customer data across all CRM applications which provides Miquel, Natalie, and Sophia with accurate and up-to-date customer data.