Data quality management is critical to customer retention and single customer view for retail, finance and telco

Market segmentation and cross sell campaigns are reliant on clean, standardised data

Tuesday, 1 December 2009

Data quality management is critical to customer retention for retail, telecommunications operators and financial services companies with large distributed customer bases, yet it has been largely overlooked by these industries, according to compliance and data management specialists, Datanomic, and South African data quality services provider, InfoBlueprint. Achieving a single view of the customer cannot be achieved without first addressing the fundamental, underlying data issues residing in multiple silos across the enterprise.

In the rush to capture market share and grow their customer bases, many companies overlooked the issue of data quality. This has now resulted in inaccurate, duplicated and outdated information residing in disparate silos of information across the operator’s IT infrastructure.

“Historically, in the race for market share, the telecommunications, retail and financial services industries collected a lot of data on customers with quality largely treated as a secondary after thought,” said Bryn Davies Director of InfoBlueprint. “Now, in the battle for customer retention, operators find themselves dependent on leveraging this data, which they are trying to use in new ways for marketing, cross sell campaigns, segmentation and customer retention. Companies need to know about their customers if they are to retain them. The need for a Single Customer View has never been greater, which is why we are seeing increased demand from telco operators, banks and retail companies looking to address their underlying data issues.”

Data is often generated and entered in multiple locations throughout an organisation and held in discrete, incompatible systems. This disjointed data structure can prevent organisations from being able to gain valuable insight into their operations. Datanomic’s dn:Director for Unified B2C Marketing is an easy-to-use data enhancement tool which allows line-of-business managers (the actual owners of the data) to themselves combine and merge data resources, automatically resolving inconsistencies of format or taxonomy, highlighting gaps or errors in the data, and ultimately enabling them to generate a reliable ‘Single View of the Truth’ against which accurate analysis can be performed.

InfoBlueprint is already working with some Datanomic customers in South Africa to address these vital issues and help tailor effective market segmentation, customer retention and cross selling activities.

Described by industry analysts as “arguably the most flexible data quality product,” Datanomic’s dn:Director provides a single, unified platform that enables both business and IT personnel, such as data stewards, business analysts and owners of data, to identify and rectify compromised data which can place operations at risk. As a single product that encompasses profiling, analysis and transformation, dn:Director enables better understanding, improvement, protection and control of data quality for all types of structured and non-structured, real-time and non-real time information.