Our world today is driven by a barrage of real-time events and updates by customers. The constant stream of customer data makes it harder for an enterprise to assimilate, ingest and make sense of all the information. In addition, customers expect a seamless, connected experience as they move across an organization's customer touch points. As a result, companies must provide a seamless Omnichannel customer experience to thrive in the current environment.
let's take some real-world scenarios involving customers
1) Your customer Lisa updates her address information by calling a customer service agent.
2) Lisa browses a specific set of products on the web.
3) An hour later, Lisa opened her smartphone and ordered a product she had just browsed on the web.
4) Lisa also updates her communications preferences to postal mail for marketing offers.
Just these four simple transactions by a single customer will need a flurry of activity to create a seamless, responsive omnichannel experience for Lisa.
The average Mid-sized companies use over 20-40 different applications to reach and stay engaged with their customers. Each of these applications does something specific and specialized. Some standard customer-facing applications include CRM, Customer data platforms, Customer Support, Preference Management, Personalization applications, and Marketing messaging applications for email, text, and postal mail.
Most organizations' problems are integrating data from all the different systems and creating a responsive 360 view of the customer. The platform of choice to store this information is the Master Data Management (MDM) system built on a modern API-based design and event-driven architecture framework. The specific domain might be a customer domain, but a typical MDM system can handle Customers, Products, Accounts, Locations, Assets, and other data domains. An MDM system holds the single version of the truth for the entire enterprise!
From a process point of view, the data from all these systems would reach the MDM in real-time via API calls. Once the data is in the MDM system, the next step will synchronize all the other systems with the new information. Omnichannel customer experience is only possible when all the interfaces that touch customers have the latest and the most up-to-date data. Unfortunately, traditional MDM solutions lack the real-time APIs and interfaces to deliver the information to systems in real-time or near real-time. An MDM system traditionally does not store transactional data; however, it does store summary or insights derived from transactional data apart from all the reference information about the customer. Some of these include customer segmentation information, metrics like lifetime value, customer preferences, engagement scores, and of course, the latest customer address information. Depending on how omnichannel data is delivered to other systems, the data can be a combination of information from the MDM system and other transactional systems such as customer data platforms. In modern data architecture frameworks, MDM is generally at the center and is an essential part of the framework that delivers an omnichannel customer experience.
OpenDQ is zero license cost Master data management system, reach out to us for a custom demo tailored for your requirements!