By now we all know about master data management (MDM) systems and how they can bring about stunning business results. We’ve heard how they generate and maintain an enterprise-wide “system of record” that contains the consistent, reliable information necessary to perform vital business functions across a large organization. And, we’ve heard how implementing a strong MDM strategy can increase revenue and profits, improve customer service, reduce time to market, enhance regulatory compliance and simplify reporting and business intelligence.
While these potential business results are intriguing, exactly how are businesses achieving them? What examples demonstrate how MDM deployments are transforming how businesses manage data? This article will show, through real-world examples, how organizations in the consumer products, financial services, hospitality, retail and technology industries are using MDM solutions to manage their most important data while adding to the company bottom line.
Making Sense of Overwhelming Acquisition Data
With more than 20 acquisitions in less than 15 years, a leading consumer products company saw annual revenues soar above $2 billion. With this rapid growth, there was also a stew for unmanaged, redundant customer data. For example, over 100 million customer records were located in dozens of different source systems with no consistent business processes across the acquired business units. This made it impossible to leverage this valuable data to properly serve the company’s customers.
The need to manage this vast amount of data with speed and accuracy is what drove the requirement for a real-time MDM system. Since deployment, the MDM solution has created a trusted system of record that provides more complete and accurate information about the company’s more than 75 million unique customers, which has enabled better customer service and the ability to cross-sell products and services. In addition, the company is now benefiting from increased compliance with privacy laws because it has a more accurate understanding of the unique customers it truly serves.
Eliminating Duplicate Records Was Just the Beginning
You can overlook a lot of things when your annual revenues are more than $30 billion. But for one Fortune 100 financial services company with 60 million customer records, the cost of duplicate account records was just too high to ignore.
The financial institution was already capable of managing existing duplicate customer records but couldn’t prevent new ones from being created. By deploying a customer-centric MDM solution, the company eliminated the creation of duplicate records and improved its customer data integration while enhancing its ability to identify customers and prospects, regardless of where their records were located.
On top of the cost savings resulting from the elimination of duplicate records, the MDM system helped the company better protect customer privacy and improve opt-out compliance regardless of where the opt-out requests were housed. Customer satisfaction, retention and cross-selling were all improved. And, the company had the ability to offer and price appropriate new products and services at the point of service, regardless of where customers were accessing their account (phone, online, branch visit), which means they only see or hear about offers that specifically relate to them.
Increasing Customer Recognition and Loyalty
In the hotel business, guests aren’t just the bread and butter, they are everything. So, when an international hotel company with more than $500 million in annual revenues and approximately 15 million annual customers realized it didn’t know enough about its guests, the company got serious about customer data.
Although it used multiple systems to track guests, the company was only able to follow those enrolled in its loyalty program – about 10 percent of its customer base. This meant the company was potentially underservicing 70 percent of frequent guests who did not have a loyalty program number. With mountains of complicated data from multiple systems, representing 5,000 global properties across eight brands, getting a handle on the data was a daunting task.
