Customers are interacting with companies and brands across an ever-increasing array of channels and means. All these interactions generate valuable, independent data-points that reveal a bit more about the customer to the company. With the amount of data at the disposal of companies growing rapidly, the need for unearthing deeper insights to build a more effective competitive strategy is fast escalating. But given the complexities in capturing and managing these growing volumes of data, organizations are having a tough time in creating a single customer view that could give them a competitive edge in an increasingly customer-centric landscape. To keep pace with the expectations of modern customers, organizations need a data strategy that ensures the accuracy, validity, recency, and consistency of the data that is mined for crucial insights. In effect, what organizations need is a robust MDM strategy to deliver the best experiences to customers. Navigating the increasingly complex customer journey The customer journey is getting increasingly complex: not only do today’s customers interact with brands via different channels; they also tend to move from one channel to another during the course of their interactions. Their expectations from the brand also constantly change: from the very first contact to comparing options, making the final purchase, and through support, their needs are constantly fluctuating. No matter how efficiently you gather this data about your customers, the pace at which it grows (and changes) makes it extremely difficult to keep up with. And with customer interactions extending beyond traditional helpdesk or store visits to social media touchpoints via different devices, capturing, tracking, and analyzing these new attributes and new data types becomes a formidable task. With data about your customers continuously evolving, achieving a single customer view becomes challenging. And in the absence of such a view, it becomes extremely difficult to drive exceptional customer experiences: if you don’t understand what they want, you will never be able to deliver what they expect! The significance of MDM Given how quickly customer data evolves, what you learned about your customers yesterday might be very different from what they actually want today. To ensure the data you collect about your customers is reliable, trustworthy, and constantly updated, you need to have a robust MDM strategy in place. MDM can not only help you capture and manage the ever-evolving data about your customers; it can also allow you to build a 360-degree view of their needs and wants. Here are some reasons for MDM being seen as the star in the customer experience tale: Seamlessly onboard customers: With a centralized MDM platform, you can simplify the process of onboarding your customers. Standardized, process-driven workflows make capturing, reviewing, and approving new records far more efficient and accurate while eliminating duplicate, incomplete, and erroneous records – so you always have the latest and most accurate data about your customers. Tactfully manage customer data: An MDM platform helps break down information silos that exist in traditional organizations. Using a modern MDM solution, you can consolidate customer data from different data sources to create a single, actionable, 360-degree view. Through constant cleansing and enrichment, you can better understand their likes, dislikes, and more and meaningfully manage the relationships with your customers. Leverage visualizations: MDM also allows you to unearth deep insight from changing customer data through the power of visuals. Since modern MDM platforms provide access to a variety of intuitive dashboards and reports, you can leverage these graphic visualizations to better grasp customer data and find correlations or trends in their purchases, needs, and buying behaviors. Personalize marketing efforts: Having a detailed and accurate understanding of your customer activities across touchpoints means you can personalize your marketing campaigns to improve sales effectiveness and boost customer experience. Such personalization can not only help in better meeting customer needs; it can also empower you to reinforce customer trust while forging long-lasting customer relationships. Enhance cross-sell and upsell opportunities: The right MDM solution can pave the way for a customer-centric culture that spans departments and functions, so you can deliver more consistent experiences across products and channels. A better understanding of customer needs helps you in capitalizing on new cross-selling and upselling opportunities while constantly improving customer engagement (and satisfaction) and reducing churn. Ensure and maintain the right level of governance: An MDM platform can also help ensure privacy (and governance) is consistently interpreted and applied across the organization. Because all governance-related information is stored in a unified location, you can be clear about individual responsibilities and accountabilities to customer loyalty while ensuring compliance with relevant regulations. In the face of a deluge of customer-centric data, MDM can help in bridging information silos while integrating fragmented sources of customer data. This means organizations can build a 360-degree view of each customer more easily and completely. By allowing every customer data set to meaningfully inform the appropriate element of the actionable business strategy, MDM can become critical. Organizations can understand individual customer needs, identify trends, and capitalize on new opportunities, so the overall customer experience is seamless, consistent, and gratifying.
The Starring Role of MDM in the Customer Experience Tale
