The purpose of creativity is to create customers. ——Peter Drucker
Every day, companies around the world deploy customer relationship management (CRM) solutions in anticipation of selling products faster, smarter, creating engaging experiences, providing personalized information, and more. According to Gartner estimates, CRM software revenue in 2017 reached the $ 39.5 billion mark, replacing database management systems and becoming the world ’s largest software market.
In fact, many customers today have deployed multiple CRMs for different business teams, departments, or regions, which will only cause problems to maximize the value of CRM. The ubiquitous CRM means that the number of companies investing tens of thousands of dollars (at least) and a lot of manpower and resources to build and start this system has reached the highest level in history. But for many companies, it is still very difficult to get a return on investment quickly. In addition, surpassing competitors using similar solutions by maximizing CRM value is also challenging.
In other words, how can companies take full advantage of CRM and gain a competitive advantage?
CRM's next advanced path can be called CRM 2.0-it will extract ready-made customer data from multiple different sources to create a single trusted version of customer data, helping companies improve marketing capabilities and promote sales. With Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, companies can splice fragmented customer information into an up-to-date and accurate unified customer profile for use throughout the entire customer sales journey and every customer interaction. This will lay a solid foundation for you to fully understand your target audience and help you better deploy business intelligence (BI), data warehouses, data lakes, and other applications and platforms.
Problems in CRM solutions
Although CRM solutions have been the gospel of enterprises since their emergence in the 1990s, even today ’s 21st century solutions still have some unresolved customer data issues. For this reason, Experian pointed out in its "2017 Global Data Management Report" that 64% of respondents said that the customer data they rely on for decision-making is incomplete or inaccurate. include:
1. Missing data:
There are often information gaps in CRM data entered by sales staff or customers, including home address, mobile phone number, occupation, demographic data, or purchase history.
2. Outdated data:
Email, real address and phone number may change at any time. Whether a potential customer is moving a new home or changing jobs, relying on outdated information to send marketing ads for it is doomed to failure before it starts.
3. Inaccurate data:
Bad data can enter your system in many ways. For example, when you enter data into operating systems such as Web forms and CRM, you have made typographical errors or simply entered inaccurate information. In addition, if you deploy multiple operating systems or CRM, you will often encounter information conflicts. For example, half of the customer's information is kept in CRM 1, and the other half is kept in CRM 2. At the same time, the data in ERP contradicts CRM.
CRM solutions have changed the way companies reach customers and understand customer needs. However, only with high-quality data can sales and marketing personnel take full advantage of this solution. If you view the CRM solution as an independent, isolated system, you will miss the opportunity to eliminate data gaps and inaccurate information. If you can improve customer data and connect CRM data with other isolated systems, you can enhance its value. Conversely, ignoring incomplete or erroneous customer files may lead companies to go the wrong way.
Use superior data to power your CRM
CRM can simplify, protect and expand the customer interaction process, so it allows companies to track and analyze every existing and potential customer interaction, so as to mine more sales leads, conclude more transactions and improve customer satisfaction. However, controlling customer data or providing power through a strong customer profile is one of the necessary prerequisites for CRM to succeed.
Controlling customer data will allow your company to create "gold customer records." That is, different records, whether from multiple CRM instances or a variety of marketing automation, e-commerce, warehouse, and inventory management systems. All links together and solve the problem of duplication and lack of information, thereby generating high-confidence customer data that can be shared with sales, marketing and other personnel.
So, how can you control the data to build this unified view? How can you help CRM to ensure that every function you deploy can get a richer return on investment?
Answer: MDM
As a flexible and extensible interconnected platform, MDM can effectively manage master data and provide you with a single trusted version of critical business data (such as CRM data). MDM is also the central hub for integrating, cleaning, enhancing and governing master data, whether it is product data, customer data, supplier data, location data or asset data. In addition, please note that only by establishing the correct process and inviting appropriate personnel to participate in it can ensure that the governance and management results are as expected, and MDM can be successful.
