Enter Centric: A Customer Master Data Management Plan
Using its expertise in data architecture and master data management (MDM) solutions, Centric Consulting created a single source of truth for customer data, which helped improve sales lead generation and marketing effectiveness. We worked closely with the client to uncover several data and processing issues, including duplicate data, incomplete data, inaccurate data, and inconsistent customer permissions.
Upon further investigation, we realized that while a manual system was part of the initial problem, the company lacked a system that could govern and facilitate a single source of customer data. As a result, the first step was to implement an MDM solution to better manage the data’s competency regarding people, processes, and technologies. The MDM solution helped our client automate and optimize the campaign management process, which allowed them to manage their customer data more effectively.
The MDM also allowed the client to create a proper foundation for a data warehouse as part of a larger enterprise data strategy, quickly improving the quality of customer data and helping the client identify potential customers, create leads, and disqualify potential customers when appropriate.
Our Data and Analytics team also worked with the client’s team to complete additional project deliverables, including:
- Evaluating and setting up an MDM solution as an architectural foundation and algorithmic campaign management to create a single view of customers and prospects while minimizing risk to the existing data architecture.
- Using Profisee MDM, a data quality tool, and Melissa Data matching, which combats duplicate records, to achieve data matching, cleaning and enrichment.
- Implementing bidirectional customer data harmonization between the MDM, the Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and the Adobe Campaign cross-channel customer data platform.
While rolling out the MDM solution, our team also helped the client perform a gap analysis to ensure all business objectives were being met, to identify critical customer data attributes and customer activity data, and to identify single-source-of-truth “golden records” for sales representatives to access for their customers and prospective customers.
The Result: Improved Quality of Customer and Prospects Data to Improve Marketing Campaign Performance
With our help, the client made important improvements to their data, virtually eliminating data-related customer support tickets. This gave the sales team a way to manage data quality themselves and reduced data warehouse implementation costs.
Additionally, the initiative centralized business logic, which resulted in an 80 percent simplification of marketing campaign logic. With a more comprehensive understanding of their customers and prospects, our client can now more effectively and efficiently market the right products to the right customers.
Conclusion
Our client wanted to improve customer data quality more effectively to generate leads and perform better campaign management. With help from our data and analytics experts, our client realized that they lacked the tools to fix a system that could govern and facilitate a single source of customer data.
We created an MDM solution that became an architectural foundation to help minimize risk to the existing architecture while implementing data rules, data governance, and dashboards. In addition, a gap analysis identified the critical customer data attributes. As a result, new data governance dashboards and reports began to eliminate data-related customer support tickets. Additionally, their sales team now has a tool for self-service data management to help them effectively generate future leads.
