The Elusive, yet Achievable, 360° Customer View

Globalization and a multitude of sales channels, including the Internet, contribute to increasing competition and decreasing product differentiation. Customers are constantly looking for cheaper and better products and services. Companies have come to the realization they need to be customer-centric to remain abreast of all these challenges and find the differentiating factor that will allow them to retain their existing customers and gain new ones.

Companies have gone through many transformations in the last three decades with process re-engineering, lower manufacturing defects, better inventory control, more efficient supply channel management, and other efforts to decrease production costs and increase product quality. While there is always the possibility for technology advancements and other types of improvements in these areas, the knowhow is mostly widespread, lowering the opportunity for differentiation.

Customer information becomes that unique asset that smart companies can use to gain a competitive edge. While some companies have agreed with this logic and have tried to foster a customer-centric view in the last few years, the actual execution has been mostly flawed. Companies have engaged in a widespread effort to collect as much information as possible from their customers, but they have retained all that information fragmented across their multiple siloes.

MDM disciplines can finally help overcome that barrier, and bring management of customer data to an enterprise level and ultimately enable a true 360° view, which had been intangible until then. Moreover, as companies adopt additional MDM disciplines for other data entities such as product, supplier, partner, and so on, they will be able to create a multidimensional web of information that can be arranged and extrapolated to provide any desired intelligence and unlimited benefits.