Tag Archives: duplicate data
Mind the Gap: How Sales Operations Can Overcome Five Customer Information Gaps in Salesforce
Lockton is the world’s largest private insurance broker. Their goal is to achieve 95% client retention. The company, which operates in 60 countries, successfully adopted Salesforce to empower 4,450 associates to continually improve cross-sell and up-sell to existing clients.
To succeed, the director of operations at Lockton knew that the associates need to know who their customers and prospects are and which products and services they already have. When he investigated, he found several customer information gaps in Salesforce.
Below are five customer information gaps in Salesforce CRM that can impact sales:
Mind the Gap: How Sales Operations Can Overcome 5 Customer Information Gaps in Salesforcecompanies.
Gap #1: Which customer record can I trust?
Before reaching out to a customer (let’s use fictitious client Mark Niles), the sales rep needs to access Mark’s contact information in Salesforce. Chances are Mark Niles’ customer information is spread across multiple duplicate lead, account and opportunity records with inaccuracies, inconsistencies and incomplete information. For example, potentially four records exist in Salesforce for one customer 1) Mark Niles 2) Marc Niles 3) M. Niles 4) Mark. The customer information gap becomes worse when a company has multiple Salesforce orgs. Sales dilemma: Which Salesforce customer record can I trust and update?
Gap#2: Which products and services does my customer already have?
Before a sales rep can identify which product or service to offer Mark Niles, she needs to know which ones Mark already has and if he has any outstanding issues. Chances are Mark Niles’ product information is stored in enterprise systems such as SAP, Oracle or JD Edwards ERP, customer support systems and maybe cloud applications such as NetSuite and Eloqua that are not integrated with Salesforce. Sales dilemma: Why can’t I access all relevant customer information from my Salesforce customer record?
Gap #3: What is impacting my customer right now?
Sales reps want to be up-to-date before reaching out to customers. They may need to go outside of Salesforce to get information such as credit scores and news announcements that may impact the timing of customer contact and the conversation. Sales dilemma: Why can’t relevant third-party data be included in my Salesforce customer record? (more…)
Why MDM and Data Quality is Such a Big Deal for Big Data
Big Data is the confluence of three major technology trends hitting the industry right now: Big Transaction Data (describing the enormous growing volumes of transactional data within the enterprise), Big Interaction Data (describing new types of data such as Social Media data that are impacting the enterprise), and Big Data Processing (describing new ways of processing data such as Hadoop). If you can imagine companies having problems with business-critical master data such as customers, products, accounts, and locations at current data volumes, now that problem is compounded many-fold with the growth into Big Data. That’s where MDM and Data Quality come in as the fundamental solutions. So, why is MDM and Data Quality such a big deal for Big Data? (more…)
Are Line Of Business (LOB) Executives Involved In MDM Or Is It Mostly An IT Initiative?
In recent conversations, I’ve been asked whether line of business executives are getting involved in master data management (MDM), or whether MDM is still mostly an IT initiative.
Attract & Retain Customers with Informatica Customer Centricity Solution (with MDM at the core)
From our experience at Informatica, the business is absolutely involved! In fact, it’s often a high-impact business event that triggers the alarm that a company needs MDM and data quality to deliver trusted and complete data. Many times, the root cause of these business problems is inconsistent, incomplete and duplicated customer data. Two examples:
1) An $8 billion technology manufacturer implemented Informatica MDM after its IT team couldn’t quickly and accurately respond to an executive’s request for a list of the company’s top 400 B2B customers. It took IT six weeks to assemble the information because it was scattered across applications, and many large customers had complex hierarchies with multiple subsidiaries that all had to be reconciled by hand. Next step, focus on the next 400 customers. (more…)
Are You Building The Right Foundation For CRM 2.0? Bridge Your Data Silos With MDM
Improving your company’s ability to attract and retain customers requires that you take your customer relationship management (CRM) system to the next level of effectiveness—regardless of whether it’s a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application like salesforce.com or on-premise such as Siebel CRM or a custom-built application. (more…)
MDM-Embarking on CRM 2.0? Then You Know It’s All About The Data
Arguably the top lesson of CRM 1.0 was simply this—data matters. Though CRM 1.0 promised to deliver a 360-degree customer view, untold numbers of multimillion-dollar CRM systems fell short of expectations because they failed to address the incomplete, incorrect, inconsistent and duplicate data that proliferated across the enterprise.
Acquire & Retain Customers with Trusted & Complete Customer Data
Now companies are moving to CRM 2.0, in many cases to the cloud with salesforce.com or another software as a service (SaaS) provider. And this time, determined to get the data right, many businesses are looking to master data management (MDM) and data quality to generate a true 360-degree customer view. (more…)
How Banks Can Use MDM To Increase Customer Share of Wallet
If you mention master data management (MDM) to sales, marketing or customer service personnel in a bank, their eyes might glaze over. After all, MDM sounds like something for the IT folks to worry about—not something that can help customer-facing staff and managers do their jobs better.
Acquire & Retain Customers with Trusted & Complete Customer Data
But show them this new online demo on the business benefits of MDM, and you’d get a different reaction … quite possibly, “When can we have this up and running?”
This six-minute business-focused demo, Customer Centricity in Financial Services, gives you a step-by-step look at how sales, marketing and customer service in the banking industry can use Informatica MDM and Informatica Data Quality, to get a single view of each customer (also known as the single customer view), including which products and services they are using, and customer relationships (also known as house-holding). This information helps customer-facing employees improve customer acquisition and retention by identifying relevant cross-sell and up-sell opportunities to increase customer share of wallet, and by delivering better customer service because they have visibility into a customer’s full relationship with the bank. (And, it helps IT maximize the value of their customer relationship management (CRM) investment). This demo shows how easy it is to create three levels of customer views:
1) Single customer view: Creating golden records by reconciling names, addresses, emails, phone numbers, and other data from disparate sources for a single view of a customer.
2) 360-degree customer view: Expanding the single customer view to include the customer’s products across lines of business (checking, mortgage, IRA, car loan, etc.)
3) Extended customer view: Expanding the 360-degree customer view to reflect the customer’s network of people, business, and product relationships and help customer teams pursue long-term, multigenerational value. (more…)
Seven Ways To Reduce IT Costs With MDM
We often hear from our Informatica MDM customers about the main benefits they’ve realized from master data management (MDM)—smarter, faster decision-making and greater productivity though timely and reliable data. What’s less widely recognized is that MDM is proving to be a powerful cost-saving engine, as well.
For instance, a global investment bank saved millions of dollars by using Informatica MDM to virtually eliminate maintenance and support costs for a complex web of point-to-point integrations. If you’re using or considering MDM, it’s a smart idea to assess the costs of unintegrated data systems and examine cost-saving strategies and tactics available through a multidomain, model-driven MDM solution.
We’ve just published a new white paper, “Seven Ways to Reduce IT Costs with Master Data Management,” that drills down into using MDM to target the redundancy, waste, inefficiency, and unnecessary maintenance and licensing typical of a heterogeneous data infrastructure. A sampling of these seven critical areas includes:
- Interface costs: How you can minimize costly point-to-point integrations that support key business processes
- Redundant third-party data: How you reduce acquisition costs of duplicate data from third-party providers such as Dun & Bradstreet or Acxiom
- Data cleanup: How you can efficiently centralize data quality to eliminate expensive manual efforts (more…)
MDM – What’s The Cost Of Bad Data In Financial Services?
One of the most critical first steps for financial services firms looking to implement multidomain master data management (MDM) is to quantify the cost savings they could achieve.
Unfortunately, a thorough analysis of potential ROI is also one of the steps least followed (a key culprit being disconnects between business and IT).
This shortcoming is spotlighted in a new Informatica white paper, “Five Steps to Managing Reference Data More Effectively in Investment Banking,” which outlines key questions to ask in sizing up the cost implications of bad data and antiquated systems, such as:
- How long does it take to introduce a new security to trade?
- How many settlements need to be fixed manually?
- How many redundant data feeds does your firm have to manage?
- How accurate and complete are your end-of-day reports?
- Do you have the data you need to minimize risk and exposure? (more…)
The Win-Win Of Enabling Customer Centricity with MDM
One of the world’s largest financial services providers assessed the workload and productivity of its 16,000 financial advisors, and the results were not pretty. This Fortune 50 firm found that its customer-facing representatives were spending:
- 70% of their time searching for and reconciling data on customers and products
- 30% of their time on revenue-generating activities, such as cross-sell and up-sell
That’s a pretty poor ratio, and it hurt the bottom line with subpar productivity and lost revenue opportunities. Unfortunately, it’s not uncommon in financial services and other industries. And experience has shown that whatever you think your company’s ratio is, the reality is probably worse.
Attract and Retain Customers with Trusted and Complete Data
But it’s also a solvable problem, as you can find in our new white paper, “Get on the Fast Track to Maximizing Customer Value.”
For this financial services firm, the root cause of the problem was that business-critical data about customers, their products and services was spread across account-centric system silos, which prevented them from gaining a customer-centric view. Financial advisors were unable to readily identify which clients had which products. Without that insight, they couldn’t effectively cross-sell and up-sell the right products to the right customers. So they were forced to spend excessive time manually pulling information from all these separate systems into a spreadsheet.
To make matters worse, advisors couldn’t accurately measure each client’s value to the institution. The firm couldn’t tailor service levels to customer profitability, meaning that expensive services might be provided to customers of marginal profitability—while high-value customers didn’t receive the attention they deserved.