Being able to compile an accurate view of an existing or prospective customer is a tremendous competitive differentiator. Knowing your customer can allow you to make the right upsell offer at the right time to drive increased revenue, to take the right action at the right time to prevent losing a dissatisfied customer, and to provide a tailored experience which builds customer loyalty/reduces customer churn.

Knowing your customer involves understanding who they are across your entire business and in today’s social age, even outside of it. Different parts of the business may identify one customer slightly differently, and have different relevant pieces of information about that customer. How do you bring all this together? This is the domain of Master Data Management – building a single “golden” view of a customer from many different sources and allowing seamless access to this view to consuming applications. If you think enabling this is straightforward, and can be built from scratch in-house, you should give your head a good shake. You can only re-invent so many wheels with your IT department.

With the explosion of available data, Master Data Management is more important than ever. Now, in addition to your various internal sources of record from which to build a picture of your customer you have countless social and other third-party sources. Matching customer identity across all of these and viewing relationships between customers is more crucial than ever!