MDM for Customer Data: Optimizing Customer Centric Management of Your Business

by Kelvin K. A. Looi

Overview

Practical and informal, this manual clearly defines Master Data Management (MDM), a set of processes and tools that consistently define and manage the nontransactional data entities of an organization. Demonstrating how to implement MDM and how to make it complement other IT solutions, this handbook proves that MDM is a fascinating and up-and-coming approach that allows organizations to run customer-centric business operations. With chapters on data governance, MDM data domains, and customer-data case studies, this reference will appeal to programmers, chief information officers, and information technology architects and managers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781583476888
Publisher:	Mc Press
Publication date:	03/01/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	100
File size:	662 KB

About the Author

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Read an Excerpt

MDM for Customer Data

Optimizing Customer Centric Management of Your Business

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By Kelvin K. A. Looi

MC Press

Copyright © 2009 MC Press Online, LP
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58347-688-8

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CHAPTER 1

The Elusive Customer-centric Operation

Organizations have been trying to achieve a Single Customer View and provide customer-centric sales and services for a long time. How do you know when your organization is "customer-centric"? What exactly does it mean?

Defining "Customer-centric"

It is hard to universally define what it is to be customer-centric, primarily because of the difficulty inherent in the word "customer." Customer means different things to different organizations: the retail operations of a bank may consider the individual account holder as its customer; a property and casualty insurance company may consider both the insured and claimants as its customers; a life insurance company may consider the agent who sells the company's insurance as its customer; a health care company may consider the doctor and pharmacist as its customers, a manufacturing company may consider both buyer and supplier as its customers; a government agency may consider all citizens as its customers. For simplicity, instead of citing examples using many different industries, the retail banking and insurance industries will be used throughout this book as the predominant examples, since much of the population have bank accounts and insurance policies, thus making them easy to relate to. Hopefully, after reading this book you will gain a new understanding of Master Data Management (MDM) and be able to relate it back to your own industry and situation.

A good way to define a customer-centric operation is to view it from the customer's perspective — what they want to buy and how they wish to be served — not from the organization's perspective — how the organization wants to sell and service its customers. A distinction must be made about whether a customer is new (i.e., has no current or previous relationship with the organization) or already exists. For the sake of this definition, we will look at the customer-centric definition from an existing customer's perspective. New customers will offer the organization some slack when not being served in a customer-centric way, since the assumption is that the organization doesn't know who they are. Of course, the new customer still expects the organization to provide service with pleasantry and respect. However, once customer data is captured from the first instance of a business transaction, the customer's expectations will be higher. No excuses exist for the organization not to be customer-centric when providing further sales and services to this customer. A customer can be a person (e.g., for a retail bank) or even another organization (e.g., a customer of a corporate bank or supplier of a manufacturing company), but they all want the same things. They simply wish for the company to:

· Know who they are

· Know who they are related to (for a single customer, these relationships could be family household members, where they work, and related third parties that are of interest, such as their accountant, lawyer, etc. For an organization, relationships could include the organizational hierarchy, departments, employees, and related third parties that are of interest, such as any registered regulatory bodies, marketing associations, etc.)

· Know what products and/or services they own and/or subscribe to

· Know what products and/or services the rest of their family/business owns and/or subscribes to

· Know who they work for, in what capacity, and what their employers own

· Know their past interactions across all channels

· Know what new products are important to them

· Know when, where, and how to reach them (e.g., address, phone number, fax, e-mail, etc.) as well as when to use these channels and for what purpose

· Know their privacy preferences (whether they want to receive sales campaigns or not. If yes, for what products, through what channels and when) and protect their data against unwarranted access or usage

· Be up to date with information (e.g., when customers move or change phone numbers, they only want to have to notify the company once, not five times because they purchase five products)

· Provide consistent sales and service experiences across all channels

· Tell them about things that might be of interest without them having to ask

The list can go on and on, based on scenarios for different types of customers and lines of business (LOBs). But to keep things simple, we can summarize a customer-centric operation according to the following four "KEEP" categories:

· Knowledge (K):

* Who they are
* What products and/or services they have
* Their interactions across all channels
* How they want to be served and sold to across all channels

· Efficiency (E)

* Requests should only need to be made once
* Requests should be executed quickly and accurately

· Effectiveness (E)

* Know how profitable they are or are not and treat them appropriately
* Provide them consistent treatment across all channels

· Proactivity (P)

* Predict what they need and tell them before they need it
* Remind them of actions your company needs to do

The "Driving Test"

Let's use our regular banking experience as an example. I call this the "driving test" to see whether a bank is customer-centric in the way it interacts with me. Here's how the scenario works:

Let's start with my bank profile. I have a few accounts with my bank — a personal savings account, a personal checking account, a personal credit card with which I have joint ownership with my wife, and a brokerage account to manage my investments; I also have a company savings/checking account for the small business that I own and run from my home (called ABC Corporation), another credit card for my business, and a trust account for which my two daughters are the beneficiaries. I don't have much money in my personal savings and checking accounts as my money is invested and managed via the brokerage account and ABC Corporation.

My business has been reasonably successful, and I have just moved to a new and bigger home. In addition, I have installed a few new phone lines for my personal and business use.

I signed on to the bank Internet service and started to change my personal profile for my accounts. I managed to change my phone profile and then realized that I didn't have time to complete my address change, because I had to drive to an important customer meeting. So, I got into my car, put on my hands-free mobile phone device, called my bank's service number, and started to drive. Since I don't carry all my banking details with me, the number I dialed was the one listed on the back of my personal credit card in my wallet. So, here's where my "driving test" starts. I want to be able to do all my address change transactions for all my accounts with my bank during this drive, without having to have my hands off the steering wheel. If my bank can do this, it would have a pretty decent customer-centric operation and pass the test. Here are my expectations for what the customer service representative (CSR) knows and can do for me during this call:

· Knowledge of who I am. When the CSR picks up my call, he or she should already know my personal profile, my family members, my company, and all my accounts:

* Most banks would have a technology solution to partially handle this. Telephone-to-computer technology would be available in most Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems and call center CRM systems. If I don't disable my mobile phone number from being displayed at the other end, the current technology available in the call center should be able to use my phone number and inquire through available systems to figure out who I am. Most CRM systems would do a pretty decent job of managing my relationship profiles. However, knowing my total account portfolio is where these systems start to have difficulty. Most IVR/CRM implementations are designed to handle certain product lines. The most likely case is that the CSR from the call center that I dialed using the telephone number listed on the back of my credit card will know my credit card's portfolio, but not the rest of my accounts. Some banks may consolidate the call center services of all the businesses within their retail bank operation. This will improve their knowledge of the customer profile across retail banking. However, information from other LOBs, such as investment and corporate banking, for the same customer will be missing.

· Authenticate me to make sure I am really who I say I am. Anybody could have picked up my mobile and called. The CSR should ask me a few questions that only I would know the answers to in order to authenticate me:

* Note here that I said my hands must always be on the steering wheel: I can't reach into my wallet and pull out my credit card. The CSR cannot insist on my knowledge of my credit card number before we can proceed. I should not be expected to remember my credit card number (until this day, I do not). This is where many organizations fail the driving test. Many will still require you to state your account number or product number before you can proceed any further — thus marking them as a very account- or product-centric operation.

· Know that I changed my phone number on the Internet a few minutes ago and can verify that the changes went through correctly for all my accounts:

* The CSR should know my interaction history. This is another weak point for most organizations. Some of those with CRM technology can handle interaction history, but only if you are using the same channel. That is, if I called the call center channel a few minutes ago, and then again now, the bank would know. But, since I did my earlier transactions through the web channel, this is not captured, at least not in real time. Some CRM implementations might load the interaction history from the web channels, but this typically happens in batch mode (normally overnight). As we all know, this is a real-time world. Any delay in the propagation of information is going to negatively affect your customer service or sales. For those of you who are not familiar with information technology terminology, batch processing is a way to accumulate all the changes made to a database over a period of time. These changes are then submitted for processing to the system all at the same time, in batches, when the system is less busy, typically after business hours.

* To make matters worse, many organizations have multiple CRM instances, one for each product line, because that's how most CRM software is designed. Using our banking example again, in any typical bank, a separate CRM implementation instance is used for credit cards, retail banking, investment banking, commercial banking, etc. Most, if not all, CRM vendors have done a bad job in synchronizing and sharing information across all CRM applications. This gets worse when you start to use different CRM solutions from different vendors for different LOBs. Some organizations try to implement one instance of the CRM solution (note that I mention one instance, not multiple instances of the same solution) as the panacea. This strategy is not bad from a cost-cutting perspective, but it is very difficult to do. If your organization is a small, simple, one-line business, then it might be achievable. But the bigger and more diverse your business, the more challenging it's going to be to consolidate all your CSR channels to use one instance of a CRM solution. It gets worse in this day and age of mergers and acquisitions. When your organization merges, acquires, or gets acquired by another organization, you have to do this all over again.

* Some people will argue that data warehouse technology can handle interaction history across all channels. There is some truth to this, but it is manageable only in batch mode, not in real time. Some data warehouse diehards will try to turn their data warehouse into a real-time system or an operational data warehouse system. As much as we'd all love to be able to turn a batch analytical processing system into a real-time operating system, this is not efficient. Most operational warehouses are used to enable real-time access to the final analytical results, not to any of the base data.

· Efficiently handle the address change for me and all my accounts:

* Here is where the operational aspect of this call starts to kick in. It's no longer about knowing and viewing, it's about adding and changing. This is where the rubber hits the road in a customer-centric operation, the ability to do "once-and-done" processing. That's why I don't like the world "view" in "single customer view" projects. Many business users have told their IT department to provide a "single customer view" solution, and a lot of times, that's what they get — a solution that might support the single customer view process but not the single customer change process. In many cases, since no single update capability is available, the view is accomplished by consolidating customer information from many source systems. This inherently forces a lot of consolidation to be done via batch processes and therefore provides an out-of-date view. So, be careful what you ask for when you want a "single customer view" project. One of my former bosses once said to me: "Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it." This time-honored warning holds equally true in developing customer-centric solutions.

* Statistics might vary based on location, but I am told that as many as one out of every 20 Americans changes his or her address every year. Of course, your customers may differ based on the nature of the product you sell and the location you operate in. However, based on the real-estate activities in my neighborhood every year, this number seems to hold water. This sort of change will generate a substantial amount of activity in any call center — that's why I chose this example. I am sure every organization will be able to find its own favorite example of frequent customer business transactions.

· Treat me effectively:

* Right from the moment I dial in, the CTI/CRM system should know how valuable I am to the bank. So, if it is a busy time for the call center, and I am one of their more profitable and valuable customers, I should get connected and serviced first. This differentiated treatment should be consistent across all channels that I engage in with the bank.

· Be proactive in providing services and sales:

* The CSR servicing me should know that I am sharing my credit card with my wife, who also has other accounts with the same bank. However, due to privacy regulations, the CSR cannot tell me what accounts my wife has, and I cannot initiate any address change process on her behalf. Knowing that I have moved, the CSR might want to ask whether my wife would like to be given a reminder to call in and request a change of address. If the answer is positive, the CSR should take the initiative to contact my wife later or have the system send her a reminder to initiate the change of address. In addition, due to the fact that I have moved, the system should provide intelligence to the CSR to sell me additional products. For example, I might need to spend some money to renovate my house or buy furniture. Therefore, I might be interested in a line-of-credit facility. Alternatively, my credit card limit might be reviewed for an increase, and a different credit card with loyalty points might be offered to me so that I can accumulate some points as well.

If my bank has the necessary infrastructure and operational setup to handle this scenario, it would be a pretty good customer-centric bank. Does your bank pass the "driving test"? Would your business pass the test?

CHAPTER 2

The Application Agenda Era

Since the early days of computing, organizations have used technology to help automate many of the tedious tasks and business processes that happen every day. Computer applications have been implemented to automate every business process imaginable, from order entry to the billing and fulfillment of customer purchases. Very frequently, these applications are repeated across different products and lines of business (LOBs). Tasks and business processes that used to take months to finish can now be accomplished in minutes. We are doing business in the application agenda era.

This same application agenda technological era has resulted in many application silos. A great many silo order entry, billing, and fulfillment systems have been built across various LOBs. When a customer has a problem, such as not getting a product that was ordered, the organization's staff must sign on to multiple systems to find out what went wrong. Some industries, such as banks for example, have managed to incorporate the business automation of manual processes into a single product system — a core banking system for managing direct deposit accounts such as savings and checking accounts. However, as the banking business grows organically or through acquisition, many companies end up with multiple product systems, handling things like credit cards, loans, treasury investments, brokerage accounts, and more. Therefore, managing a customer problem still requires access to multiple systems at the same time.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from MDM for Customer Data by Kelvin K. A. Looi. Copyright © 2009 MC Press Online, LP. Excerpted by permission of MC Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Praise for MDM for Customer Data,
Title Page,
Copyright Page,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
The Customer MDM Solution,
Chapter 1 - The Elusive Customer-centric Operation,
Chapter 2 - The Application Agenda Era,
Chapter 3 - The Information Agenda Era,
Chapter 4 - MDM for Customer Data,
Chapter 5 - How Other Organizations Use MDM for Customer Data: Case Studies,
Chapter 6 - Data Governance,
Chapter 7 - Be Careful What You Ask For: Your IT Might Actually Deliver,
Chapter 8 - Other Master Data Management Data Domains,

Editorial Reviews

This book is a must have for anyone who has been given the opportunity to make their organization more customer centric.” —Douglas P. Thompson, senior enterprise architchect, SunTrust



"This book offers a practical approach to selecting an architecture and roadmap that supports such a strategy." —Chai Lam, managing enterprise architect, Bank of Montreal Financial Group

From the Publisher