The key benefits of Master Data Management: What is it and why quality data verification is vital to its success
According to Wikipedia Master Data Management is: “a method used to define and manage the critical data of an organisation to provide, with data integration, a single point of reference.”
It is essentially a process, technology and governance creating a single version of the truth on which to base decisions, that is complete, accurate and trustworthy. MDM should allow companies to access, visualise, analyse and distribute sustainable data over time to ensure people can be right faster.
Businesses have a vast amount of valuable data in their systems that needs to be cleaned and organised in order to provide exceptional services, sell more effectively, be more compliant and plan better campaigns. In this day and age, it is imperative that companies understand customers’ needs and create a better customer experience.
In addition to making sure there’s one single version of the truth, we need to know this data is standardised, validated, cleansed and enriched to ensure we have a accurate and complete 360 view of our customers. The data we have we collect should include all types, including interactions, social and unstructured information. If data is inaccurate, marketing will be ineffective, brand image will be damaged and conversions rates will fall. The old adage garbage in, garbage out comes to mind when thinking about why it is vital to have high quality and consistent data across multiple business consumers.
At Reltio, when we talk about MDM we are very often referring to creating a single view of a customer – or a customer 360 view. This brings together all of the information your organisation holds on an individual or organisation from different sources and makes the best possible, highest quality version of that data.
360 views take into account all relationships a customer has with other entities – e.g. locations, products, people and households. Understanding these relationships provides the ability to sell and market more effectively. We are then able to run great analytics on master data and customer interactions to determine the next best offer, propensity or simply the best communication to send to a customer.
The other vital component is clean, high quality address and location data to match your own records against. At Reltio we have partnered with the leading vendor in the space - Loqate - to ensure our Customer 360 solutions can provide this.
If you adopt this approach to your customer data projects you will be able to achieve a true 360 view of your “people” data. This ability will be vital to transform into a digital enterprise and improve your customer experiences. A big part of that will be the knowledge that your MDM and data solutions providers are world-class and high quality like Reltio and Loqate.
The experts here at Reltio have been in the MDM sphere for 20+ years and have taken their knowledge to create a next-generation data platform using modern technologies that allow companies to deliver measurable business outcomes. Essentially, we clean up and organise data that you hold about your customers and products so that you can sell and market more effectively and provide great customer service experience. We are helping companies with their digital transformation to meet the customer expectations and effectively compete in a very competitive marketplace.