Tag Archives: CRM
How Can A Single View of Your Customer Helps You Better Manage your Customer Service? (Part One)
One thing we all have in common in this modern world, is that we have all, at some point in our lives, been on the receiving end of poor customer service.
Don’t get me wrong, a career in customer service is not an easy one, and I’m sure there are many service providers out there who have been wrongly on the receiving end of an angry customer, for reasons out of the businesses hands, that’s another topic in itself. It is hard, however, to ignore that one thing companies often fail on heavily is providing a timely, easy to access and appropriate level of service for their customers. (more…)
When It Comes to Data Quality Delivery, the Soft Stuff is the Hard Stuff (Part 5 of 6)
In my last blog post I discussed why an understanding of corporate financial concepts is so important to data quality success. In this blog, I will examine knowledge of commercial enterprise applications as a key enabler of effective data quality delivery.
Packaged applications for ERP, CRM, MRP, HCM, etc. were first introduced decades ago to provide tightly integrated business management functions, standardized processes and streamlined transaction processing. While one can argue whether or not these applications have lived up to all of the hyperbole, the reality is that they have been successful and are here to stay. As these backbone systems continued to evolve and mature, lessons learned from thousands of implementations were incorporated into the model solutions as best practices. These best practices spawned industry standard processes and specialized variants were born (e.g. vertical systems solutions). With the widespread adoption of these solutions, the days of custom building an application to meet the business’s needs have largely disappeared (although exceptions do persist to support specialized needs). (more…)
A Case for Universal MDM: The Federation of Point-MDM Solutions
I’m at Barcelona this week for the European Gartner MDM Summit. I had a chance to catch up with one of the Gartner MDM analysts before the event, and we had a discussion about the growth of MDM. He mentioned that MDM will become pervasive within the enterprise as organizations expand its use as a necessary foundation for governing all of their business-critical master data such as customers, products, and so on.
To solve their business problems accurately, companies seek targeted MDM solutions. For e.g., retail, distribution, and manufacturing companies use PIM for merchandising, distributing products, and supplier on-boarding, while financial services, healthcare, and high tech companies use customer MDM with their CRM, such as salesforce.com, for improving customer segmentation, cross-sell , and up-sell. (more…)
Ballooning Data Sets Cause Application Performance Problems
According to a 2011 Ovum survey, 85% of respondents cited ballooning data sets as the cause of application performance problems. Many IT organizations fell short in 2012 letting unmanaged data growth impact the business. This year, Informatica is witnessing a surge of interest in Enterprise Data Archive solutions. This interest is being created because executives want to invest in innovative technologies for real-time and operational analytics. Yet, with little to no IT budget increase, IT leaders are getting creative.
Businesses are moving from on premises applications to Software as a Service (SaaS) freeing up time and resources – yet the legacy application being replaced all too often stays in the data center consuming costly resources. IT leaders are recognizing the quick win of retiring legacy applications. An application retirement strategy supports data center consolidation and application modernization initiatives – while ensuring data is retained to meet regulatory compliance and business needs. Significant cost savings are realized because mainframe systems can be turned off, maintenance costs go away. With this new source of revenue, executives can fund their analytics projects and drive competitive operations. (more…)
12 Ways You Can Benefit from a Single View of Your Customers in Your CRM
The terms “Single View of a Customer” (SVC) and “360-degree view of your customer” are often bandied about amongst marketers and sales people. Day-in and day-out, we collect information about our customers to use for analysis, forecasting and budget planning.
The first thing a sales person is required to do after being introduced to their territory is to find out everything there is to know about their accounts. What did their customers buy? What “pain point” did the product address? How much did the customer pay for it? Did they pay on time? Were there any issues with delivery/implementation of the product? (more…)
Interstate Batteries Dreamforce Story: How Can You Be #1 Without Trusted Customer Information?
Last week I posted this blog, OppenheimerFunds Dreamforce Story: Lay a Foundation of Trusted and Complete Customer Information for Salesforce.
Another superb Dreamforce story was delivered by Interstate Batteries’ director of Market IQ, Mike Darr.
Did you know Interstate Batteries is the number one replacement brand battery in North America? Did you know batteries were perishable? These were some facts that I learned during Mike’s presentation at Dreamforce 2012. (more…)
Retail Case Study: Printemps Department Store Builds a Trusted Customer Data Foundation with MDM and Data Quality
If you have never traveled to France, you have missed the unique and exciting shopping experience offered at Printemps, a luxury fashion retailer. Its flagship store in Paris drives 60% of the company’s revenue. More than 1.5 million customers who love fashion visit this store as well as the retailer’s 15 other high-end stores around the country.
Printemps Haussmann, flagship department store in Paris, France.
Printemps’ goal is to cultivate long-term personal relationships with their high value customers by delivering exceptional services. Their strategy to accomplish this goal is to continuously meet their high value customers’ needs and expectations and create compelling incentives for customers to visit their stores.
Printemps’ marketing team is continually striving to be more customer-centric and improve campaign effectiveness. They are using customer analytics to segment their customers and better understand their preferences. For example:
- Which customers prefer fashion, beauty or accessories?
- Which customers prefer communications through the mail, email, mobile phone, social media channels?
Printemps has plenty of information about their 1.5 million customers. So what
was standing in their way? They lacked a 360-degree view of their high value
customers. The key culprit was duplicate customer information across multiple
systems.
I had the honor of introducing Olivier de Compiègne, who is responsible for Project Services and Customer Relationships at Printemps at Informatica World. Olivier’s main message: if your goal is to attract high value customers and boost customer loyalty, first you must invest in a solid customer data foundation.
To build their solid customer data foundation, Printemps’ team is leveraging Informatica Data Quality to ensure their customer information is as accurate and complete as possible across all key sources. They are using Informatica MDM, master data management (MDM) technology to rationalize customer information from numerous data sources to create a single customer view as well as a 360-degree customer view, which includes each customer’s purchase history.
Printemps’ solid customer data foundation is maintained on an ongoing basis, which allows Printemps’ marketing team to have confidence in the data they use for customer analytics and campaign management. Now they can truly support personalized relationships with customers and optimize their marketing by sending tailored messages to targeted customer segments.
If you are trying to cultivate long-term personal relationships with your customers and lack a 360 degree customer view, I hope Olivier’s story was helpful. Do you have similiar goals? Please share your thoughts. I’m interested in hearing from you.
If you want to learn more about how Printemps’ is using Informatica Data Quality and Informatica MDM, please:
- Watch the video: Printemps’ Trusted Customer Data Foundation Powers Customer Centricity Strategy.
- Review Olivier de Compiègne’s Informatica World presentation slides about how Printemps is using Informatica to build a trusted data foundation. Go to Informatica World Breakout Sessions (Return on Data) to find his presentation as well as others including: Condé Nast, a magazine publisher that uses MDM to boost subscription revenue and customer loyalty.
- Read this Blog: New Aberdeen Survey Confirms MDM’s Value For Customer Centricity, which outlines how best-in-class companies are using MDM to achieve these results: 88% customer satisfaction vs. 32% for laggard companies, 91% customer retention vs. 62% for laggard, 6% increase in net client value vs. a 9% decline for laggards available.
- View this 5-minute video, 3 Key Steps to Attracting & Retaining Customers, which explains the three key customer views needed by sales, marketing and customer service to attract and retain customers: single customer view, 360-degree view of customer relationships and the complete view of customer interactions.
Leverage Big Data or Go Out of Business
I’m sitting in the Taiwan airport on my way to Guangzhou. We just completed the Informatica World Tour in Hong Kong, Beijing and Taiwan, and I’ve had the opportunity to deliver the keynote presentation, Maximize Your Return on Big Data.
All of our audiences exceeded our expectations. We had 50% more attendees than planned. Why? Big data. It is a hot topic and everyone is trying to determine how to leverage big data in their enterprise to get a competitive advantage. At the event, I made the point – if you’re not trying to understand how to leverage big data in your enterprise, your successor will. Kitty Fok, the IDC China Country Manager, spoke after me. Her consistent comment was – “if your company isn’t looking to leverage big data, you will be out of business.” (more…)
How Integration Platform-as-a-Service Impacts Cloud Adoption
Did you know that Forrester estimates in their 10 Cloud Predictions For 2012 blog post that on average organizations will be running more than 10 different cloud applications and that the public Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) market will hit $33 billion by the end of 2012?
However, in the same post, Forrester also acknowledged that SaaS adoption is led mainly by Customer Relationship Management (CRM), procurement, collaboration, and Human Capital Management (HCM) software and that all other software segments will “still have significantly lower SaaS adoption rates”. It’s not hard to see this in the market today, with cloud juggernaut salesforce.com leading the way in CRM, and Workday and SuccessFactors doing battle in HCM, for example. Forrester claims that amongst the lesser known software segments, Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Business Intelligence (BI), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) will be the categories to break through as far as SaaS adoption is concerned, with approximately 25% of companies using these solutions by 2012. (more…)
The Birth of “Jurisdiction-based Access Control”
As the founder of Dynamic Data Masking, I have the opportunity to meet many organizations worldwide, who are willing to openly discuss their security challenges.
These conversations have brought me to foresee the birth of yet another category in the fast growing application security market – Jurisdiction-based Access Control. (more…)