Maria, from the call center, is responsible for taking ACME orders over the phone. Maria needs to associate a customer to orders in the CRM by either updating an existing customer or creating a new customer based off the information provided during their phone calls.
Maria believes that the delivery address and the email address information they enter for the customers are correct. However, Maria and the other customer service representatives frequently make typos or don’t enter the information properly such as Peachtree Street versus Peach Tree Street. Maria is not able to determine if the customer already exists in the enterprise landscape with existing orders. Maria believes that any changes they make to existing customers in the CRM are automatically updated for their orders.
Maria causes operational inefficiencies with substantial cost overhead in undelivered orders and in billing issues due to the poor address data. Operational inefficiencies also exist with missed cross-sell and up-sell opportunities when email promotions are not delivered. Maria provides a poor customer experience due to their lack of knowledge of other engagements with the same customer. ACME customers have a poor customer experience because despite calling the call center to update their information they are not finding the changes reflected in their orders.
The following are examples of some solutions:
As-is
With the current system landscape, Maria cannot standardize and validate incoming information. They have a difficult time determining if the customer already exists and syncing changes to existing customers between the CRM and ERP.
To-be
With the request-response web service for coexistence style Customer MDM in place, Maria can standardize and validate incoming information during the creation / update process. From there, STEP can determine if duplicates exist for the customer, then update the existing customer based on the survivorship rules in place and send the changes to the customer back to the CRM. The CRM can then notify the ERP which can poll STEP for the current customer information. This keeps the customer accurate and up to date throughout the landscape.
