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Need for Customer Master in CRM and Customer 360

Most mid-size and large Insurers have challenges finding answers to questions like “how many unique customers do you have?”. This problem gets compounded if we consider parent and subsidiary companies. It can take weeks to get answers to these basic queries. Why? Common customer data and relationships are distributed across the enterprise in many ways and in multiple silos (i.e. systems), making consolidation a complex and time-consuming task. Compounding the problem statement is that the information is not held or collated in a standard way.

The technical aspect of the challenge 

The issue here is with the way data is stored in multiple siloed systems in the company. Driven by manual, incomplete, and inconsistent entry, complexity increases when data is defined differently in different systems.

The solution to the above problem lies with creating a Customer Master and instituting Data Governance. By using MDM and data governance we can create a golden copy, which allows us to have a single version of the truth of customer information. An MDM solution uses advanced matching algorithms to remove duplicates and has much better accuracy than operational systems like CRMs. The solution then generates a golden copy/single view of customers and pushes it back to operational systems and data stores. This ensures all the business lines and departments like marketing, sales across the organization have access to the same version of data. This is the key step in ensuring any system generating the 360‐degree view of a given customer’s total relationship to the organization can do it correctly.

MDM helps generate a golden copy of enterprise data, and to continue to maintain golden truthfulness, there needs to be a discipline to modification and handling of the data. Therefore, a successful MDM implementation depends as much on strong data governance and business/data stewardship as it does on any specific technology solution.

We can also solve problems which arise from business process and information changes when new channels are introduced, new business is acquired, new distribution partners are brought on board, the application is moved to cloud from ACORD(Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development) based model.

The Customer Master solution is expected to work both on a batch and real-time basis to take customer/account records from various transactional applications like CRM, Policy Admin, Claims, and Risk, etc. and provide a de-duplication and merge engine to provide a Golden Customer record.

By consolidating and validating business-relevant data from PAS(Policy, Administration and Servicing) Systems, Claims Systems, Legacy platforms, and CRM’s, Customer Master gives a rich and single version of the truth and provides Insurers a complete customer profile. The Customer Master can interact with other systems in real-time helping take decisions in real-time.

What are the key drivers to select MDM for customer master?

You should strongly consider an MDM solution if you are facing any of the following issues:

  • Unable to quantify how many customers you have.
  • Data Quality and Validation issues with Customer Infomation
  • You are Cleansing customer data every few months
  • Not able to identify the next best action or cross-sell and upsell to your existing customers
  • Inability to link your customers and brokers across systems
  • Updates to the customers are not shared across the other systems in the organization

What is the business problem which can be solved by MDM?

The MDM supports the following business needs that would need a single view of the customer:

  • Customer Journey map
  • Targeted Marketing Campaign
  • Customer visit
  • Prevent duplication of leads
  • Next best action
  • Manage Customer Contact Information

MDM Architecture

A typical MDM Architecture would look like the one shown here:

A-10

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