Knowledge is Power! Use MDM and Data Virtualization to Know Your Customers

These expert insights are a part of Solutions Review’s Thought Leaders, the resource hub of thought leadership content from InsightJam.com.

Why Knowledge Creates More Powerful Customer Engagement

In Meditationes Sacrae and Human Philosophy in 1597, Sir Francis Bacon wrote that “Knowledge is Power.”

Knowledge is definitely power when engaging, delighting, and creating intimate relationships with customers. But gaining this knowledge requires an all-encompassing 360-degree view of your customer data.

For example, as a service provider, you have a wide variety of data—cable, broadband, and mobile usage, billing, operations support, and service history data. But unless this data is properly accessed and aligned, it won’t help you delight or better serve your customers. And doing it wrong might actually annoy them, for example, pitching your customers something they already own or that bears no relevance to them.

Capturing your customer data, gift-wrapping it with business insight, and presenting it back to them as a relevant offer informed by their unique situation is much more effective than your guesses about their interests. Knowing your customers helps ensure that every point of engagement is a path to their delight, loyalty, pocketbooks, and a boon to your bottom line.

Why Knowing is Difficult

But gathering and garnering this kind of knowledge is not easy when your customer data is distributed, diverse, unaligned, and siloed across multiple systems. For example, is customer X in your billing system the same customer X across your call center, operations support, and marketing systems?

How Master Data Management Helps  

Your data will remain stuck in silos if it is not rationalized. This is where Master Data Management (MDM) comes in. MDM is the catalyst for you to rationalize your diverse customer IDs and create the linkages you need to know what is truly common and what is not.

As a result, your most important customers data is consistent and accurate, no matter when it was captured and where it currently resides.

How Virtual Data Management Helps 

Leveraging your MDM foundation, you can use virtual data management, also known as data virtualization, to integrate all the customer-related non-master data required to complete your 360-degree views. Using this approach, you can build a complete history of customer engagement with as much detail as you require. And because it is virtual, you can leave the data where it already resides, and yet still query it and deliver it whenever and wherever a 360-degree view is needed.

Personalize Your Customer Engagement

Armed with the complete picture, you can personalize customer service, make the smartest next best offer, and engage the way your customers prefer.

• It helps your iPad-using repairman know they have the right parts when making a service call.
• It empowers your marketers to efficiently offer services they know, not just hope, your customer will want.
• It empowers your call center reps to focus on how to help, because they already know about the customer’ past experiences and current situation.

Improve Developer Productivity

Once your 360 degree views of your customers are in place, your applications developers will find it easier  to access and use the data their business applications consume. This lets your

• call center developers can focus 100% on optimizing call center rep productivity.
• Ecommerce developers can focus on your shopping experience.
• Point of sales developers can focus on ease of use.