Pretectum

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 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 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

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 business to gain valuable insights and engage in better decision-making.

We live in a fast paced world where the velocity of changes that we experience with our trusted data makes us more and more uneasy about our confidence in that data.

Consumers and business partners change their information on an ongoing basis. Consumers move, change employer, change their phone numbers and email addresses, get married, have children and create families.

Business partners evolve and transform their identity, their location and their profiles.

In the absence of easy self service ways for them to maintain your understanding of them and your relationship with them, the data that you have, will rapidly deteriorate and no longer be appropriate and relevant.

You need good information about your consumer customers and business partners in order to give them the best customer or partner experience. You also want to engage with them in the most cost efficient way with the least amount of friction.

Poor data will lead to costly inefficiency and potentially even lead to failures in order capture, fulfilment, delivery and collections.

Pretectum solves these challenges by empowering customers and partners to engage with you more closely and in turn create and deliver improved data transparency.

The Pretectum C-MDM approach affords you with unified lensed views of your customers and partners but with the added benefit of unified high precision views.

Businesses can leverage data mastering of the customer, to harvest more strategic value from the customer data that they have and they can curate, govern, connect, enrich and syndicate to wherever the data is needed.

Pretectum solutions are built by experts in master data management with decades of experience working with Salesforce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics and other systems of record, providing innovative capabilities to enhance the quality and value of customer master data.