MDM The Cornerstone of Customer Centricity

It is no secret that outstanding customer strategies produce positive business

outcomes resulting in strong loyalty and higher revenues. However, the art of
achieving a high degree of customer centricity within an organization has been
a challenge in all aspects organizational, processes and systems. Organizations
have long strived to capture data from multiple systems (ERP, CRM, Legacy,
Web, Selling, Service Tools, etc.) and churn data into another set of systems
(Data Warehouses and Data Marts) to gain a 360-degree view of customers
and, maybe, even predict their behavior.
This paper outlines the key drivers and presents a case for organizations to
consider MDM in their solution stack to attain the elusive 360-degree customer
view on their journey toward customer centricity.

Customer 360-degree View A Problem

As customers across businesses become more demanding, any organization must understand their requirements and predict
their purchase behavior to ensure customer delight and grow profits. Presenting customers with a clear and uniform message
and a consistent and positive experience across product lines are integral to promoting customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Initiatives promising the all-important 360-degree view of the customer, thus ensuring consistency in experience, have spanned
numerous system implementations, typically the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Business Warehouse projects.
However, very few of the implementations have truly been successful in delivering the desired holistic view. Some of the typical
challenges that these initiatives face in delivering a unified view of the customer are:
1. Incomplete customer information owing to lack of data This includes the missing data attributes along with the
lack of relationships and hierarchies (Household, Family, etc.)
2. Incorrect customer information due to multiple systems capturing the same information differently
3. Multiple customer records since multiple systems duplicate records resulting in more than one record
4. Inability to capture and display historical interactions appropriately owing to a lack of one consolidated record

Incomplete Customer
Information

Incorrect Customer
Information

Challenges for
360-Degree Customer
View
Multiple Customer
Records

Inability to Display
Historical Interactions

Figure 1: 360-degree View Issues

Most organizations have already implemented CRM and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in some form or shape
either standard commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) packages or custom applications. While some organizations have implemented
more than one CRM system, numerous large-scale organizations have multiple, nonintegrated CRM and ERP systems creating
a brilliant strategy when it comes to local execution.
However, these numerous systems lead to systemic gaps across the organization on a global level which, in turn, leads to global
inefficiencies and gaps for global strategic execution. Disparate systems cause significant problems as organizations strive to
integrate their IT set-up to attain the Holy Grail of customer-centricity a single view of the customer. As customer data passes
through the complex enterprise, it may get locked up, duplicated, or worse, misrepresented and misinterpreted, obscuring the
facts and compromising information. The increasing demand for cleaner, complete and current customer data coupled with
regulatory compliances has all heightened awareness of the risks of using poor quality and stale customer data.

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How Can MDM Help?

MDM is a deliberate initiative comprising of a set of methodologies, strategies, disciplines, and technologies that enable
organizations to acquire, cleanse, enrich, consolidate, federate, and govern data across many disparate systems.
As a customer-centric business initiative, it offers a compelling business case for improving customer data quality by delivering
access to a single reference that represents the Golden Record or Best Version of Truth (BVT) for a customer which can
be achieved with an efficient Master Data Management (MDM) system. MDM offers a central repository to manage businesscritical customer data on an ongoing basis. It ensures synchronization with Business Intelligence and operational systems by
integrating customer data in real time and empowering data stewards with capabilities to accurately govern customer data
across the enterprise. The single reference helps the business gain critical organization-wide insight and helps users improve
efficiencies, reduce costs, and enhance decision-making.
Some of the key benefits that organizations can gain by using MDM include:

Enhanced Analytics

New Opportunities

Data issue

Figure 2: Key Benefits of MDM

1. Identifying and resolving key customer data issues and optimizing the manual effort required to manage and use
customer data across the enterprise
2. Identifying new opportunities to interact with customers and recognize new customer segments
3. Enhancing business intelligence, reporting and analytic capabilities

Customer Centricity and MDM

With organizations across industry verticals making significant investments in achieving customer centricity, it is necessary to
recognize how MDM solutions can benefit organizations and help manage customer data effectively. In an era where data is
mastered in multiple systems, it is imperative to recognize the boundaries of each type of application. MDM as a philosophy can
help realize the goal of customer centricity with these multiple systems. MDM is a developing philosophy backed with various
tools to achieve the BVT concept.
MDM tools are more commonly integrated with Data Cleansing tools for standardization and noise filtration in order to
minimize data quality issues being faced by the users. MDM tools either have in-built address standardization tools or have
adapters to integrate with various other address standardization tools.
The next section covers our view point on what kind of MDM architecture and solution can achieve better customer centricity
given the multiple applications in an organizations IT ecosystem.

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MDM Architecture
The type of MDM architecture to be applied in an implementation depends on the objective of the organizations MDM initiative.
The key solution components for an MDM architecture are:
1. User Interfacing Application These can be the CRM applications, customer-facing web applications, etc.
2. Data Consuming/Managing Application ERP applications
3. Data Providers: Experian, D&B, etc.
4. MDM HUB Authoritative source of information
5. Data Cleansing Tools For data cleansing and standardization
6. Address Cleansing Tools For address standardization
7. Integration Layer To ripple out the effect of data creation/manipulation to other systems in real time or near-real
time
The types of MDM architecture are:
Co-existence Style Architecture: Most organizations want the BVT to be calculated correctly from various sources for their
master data customers, partners, suppliers, etc. They input all the data into the MDM and run through the MDM engine,
applying the appropriate level of trust, data cleansing and standardization, address standardization, and consolidating the
duplicate records achieving the co-existence style of architecture. Data standardization and cleansing happens after the data
has already persisted in the source systems.
Transaction Style Architecture: This is the typical Search-Before-Create architecture. The user interface needs to have a link
into the MDM system to search for the data record being created. In case duplicate or near-duplicate records are entered, it
warns users using the Data Cleansing Tools upfront. This facilitates users to make effective decisions, thus helping them manage
their data more effectively. This requires an MDM system and Data Cleansing and Standardization tools to be available 24/7
and makes the MDM systems, along with their Data Quality and Data Cleansing tools, critical to the operational processes of
Web and CRM either selling or service. This style of architecture is often referred to as the Transaction Style of architecture
for MDM where the HUB becomes the source of authoritative information for the organization.
In a typical organization, systems are used by multiple business groups and data operations are performed by people across
these multiple business groups. These users view data pertaining to their department(s) as primary and other data inputs
as optional and nice-to-have. Thus, they often lack perspective on the importance of their data operations for downstream
systems and the impact it creates for organization as a whole.
The key to achieving a robust and strategic data strategy is to limit the data operation mistakes (user errors or otherwise) at
the source. It is imperative to operationalize the philosophy of robust search-before-create data in all front-end systems. Of
course, there needs to be a cost-benefit analysis of doing it. The data governance organization also needs to be empowered with
executive support in order to meet the objective of Right-First-Time (RFT) for data management operations.

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Customer
World Wide Web or
other Customer Facing App
Data Cleanse &
Standardization

CRM
Enterprise
Application

Address
Standardization

MDM HUB

3rd Party Data Providers

(D&B, Experian etc.)

Figure 3: Co-existence Architecture

World Wide Web or

other Customer Facing App

Customer

Data Cleanse &

Standardization
Address
Standardization

Integration Layer

3rd Party Data Providers

(D&B, Experian etc.)

Enterprise
Application

CRM
MDM HUB

Data
Operations

Sales

Figure 4: Transactional Architecture

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Key Benefits
Some of the key benefits of a customer domain MDM system with respect to customer centricity are:

Sales &
Marketing
Identification of creative
products and services
Identification of new
customer segments
Cross-Sell of products and
services
Data analysis of Customers
and identification of new
trends

Compliance

Operations

Do-Not-Track Initative
Reduce Legal cost
Increase customer
satisfaction

Preference Management
Extended Customer
View
Support Process
Improvement
Data Governance
Initatives

Figure 5: Key benefits of a customer domain MDM

Sales and Marketing
In a customer-centric business, customer insight, along with relevant customer segmentation in accordance with the
organizations products and services, becomes the basis for all decisions. In order to attain this customer insight, it is imperative
to have a single view of the customer and her preferences and attitudes as they relate to the organizations products and services.
This has a direct correlation to cross-selling and up-selling opportunities. The analysis of the Golden Record of customers and
their attributes from various sources can open untapped opportunities for organizations. These opportunities can arise from
any of the following:
1. Identification of creative products and services
2. Identification of new customer segments Family/Household/Friends, etc.
3. Cross-sell of products and services
4. Suggestive selling of products and services
5. Data analysis of customers and identification of new trends

Compliance
In this age of online data collection of customers via web portals, walk-ins and other means, Do-Not-Track initiatives become
very important from a legal and compliance perspective. As the same data moves from one system to another within the
organization, the interpretation of the data can change. This often can lead to compliance issues with Do-Not-Track initiatives
(such as Do-Not-Call, Do-Not-Email, etc.). Maintenance of master data for the Do-Not-Track initiative within the Customer
Golden Repository helps reduce compliance slips for the organization with regards their end-customers. This also helps lower
compliance costs for the organization

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Operations
MDM can help in the day-to-day operations of an organization in various ways, such as:
Preferences: In todays competitive market, the customer channel must be personalized to ensure that the target customer
segment enjoys a distinctive experience. MDM can be used as a master repository to maintain and disseminate the personalization
preference(s) of customers. In instances where there are multiple CRM applications within the organization, the case for
maintenance of preferences of the customer, against their Golden Record in the HUB, is stronger.
Extended Customer View: The HUB can be used to provide an extended customer view along with the 360-degree view,
enabling the organization to view previously untapped customer relationships such as family, friends, household, employee,
etc.
Data Governance: The MDM HUB is a central component in strengthening the organizations data governance practices. It
empowers the data champions within the organization with best-of-breed tools and helps improve data quality across the
organization.
Support Processes: Accessing correct and complete customer data along with their associated transactions is of vital importance
in resolving support incidents. This enables quicker turnaround of issues for customers and helps achieve customer delight
during the process. The identification of the hierarchies of customer data (Household, Family, Friends, etc.) can help in crosssell and up-sell during customer service calls as well making support calls an alternate revenue stream for the organization.

Conclusion
Organizations need to take a holistic customer data management perspective. The right MDM model can help the business
across a range of activities from reporting, cross-selling and up-selling to decision-making and compliance. The chances of an
MDM initiative enabling customer centricity increase significantly if organizations:
1. Consider MDM as an integral part of their customer management program along with their CRM initiative
2. Focus on MDM impacts across the landscape (ERP/CRM/Web, etc.) sales or service related
3. Focus on cleaner data flow throughout the organization starting at the source systems
4. Ensure governance to educate data custodians of the impact of their data operations across the organization
5. Provide an organizational structure to address governance issues at regular intervals

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About Infosys
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