Tag Archives: marketing
#1View for Salesforce Customers – Introducing Cloud MDM from Informatica
Yesterday I attended Informatica’s first annual Cloud Connect conference in San Francisco, which was followed by a Dreamforce 2012 kick-off party sponsored by our partners Astada, Covisint, MicroStrategy and Zyme. It was a busy day, with a keynote from Juan Carlos Soto focused on the three pillars of our cloud computing product strategy, a deep-dive technical update and Ask the Experts stations for one-on-one interaction with product management. We also announced the winners of our 2012 Cloudy Awards! Congratulations to all of the winners! I’ll post some pictures next week. (more…)
What is Change Data Capture? Something Business and IT Both Agree on for Mainframe Data Integration
A few days ago, I got a text message from a friend telling me that my favorite company’s stock price was suddenly tanking and that I should dump my holding. So I went to the news portal to get a stock quote and see where the stock price happens to be. I found that the stock didn’t move much at all. Thinking that it might’ve been a prank text message, I ignored it. To my dismay, the stock quote I saw was delayed by 20 minutes and the decline wasn’t yet reflected in the news portal. (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…)
(…) There You Are
In my last post, I introduced the notion that the persistence and/or use of location data as attribution is becoming ubiquitous. Whether we look at the stand-alone GPS devices that decorate the array of windshields across the parking lot or the capabilities typically embedded within our mobile telephones, precise location is, to some extent, overtaking the concept of “address.”
And perhaps there is some value to increasing the use of dimensional coordinates in lieu of an address. As I commented in my previous post, there are still many situations where errors or flaws in location information lead to business impacts. A common example involves marketing or sales mailings – incorrect delivery addresses increase costs when mailings or catalogs are sent to nondeliverable or incorrect addresses. (more…)
Harnessing Social Media With Informatica
Improving sales and service through customer centricity requires listening to and understanding your customers. And where are customers speaking these days?
You guessed it—social media. Just think about it. Each day, customers tweet 50 million times on Twitter and update their Facebook status 60 million times. Add in LinkedIn and user reviews and YouTube and blog commentary and more and you’ve got a customer data gold mine and a new frontier for marketing.
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.