Musicians can be talented, well-trained and well-rehearsed, but if their instruments aren’t in tune with each other, it’s going to grate on everyone’s ears like a fledgling garage band.
A similar dissonance happens when different teams within an organization use conflicting data sets. Everyone can be focused on building relationships with prospects and customers, but if the buyer information isn’t standardized, accurate and accessible, cacophony ensues. Essentially, it’s like a cluster of individuals playing different songs. Working rhythms collide and fragment the customer experience. In this all-too-common scenario, what buyers actually want gets drowned out by a deafening crescendo of conflicts – between and among technologies, data architectures and interpretations. It's no wonder buyers disengage with brands.
Although it's relatively uncommon for companies to have a single view of the customer, it’s no less critical. In a perfect world, the entire customer relationship – from its inception to its up-to-moment status – would be accessible throughout the organization. Clearly, this access would extend beyond sales and marketing to include finance, customer service, operations and virtually anyone with an ability to capture relevant data, derive meaningful insights and take appropriate action.
In the video clip below, Bob Carrigan, our musically inclined CEO at Dun & Bradstreet, explains how master data management (MDM) interconnects data and unites teams to better serve their customers.
As necessary as a single customer view is for delivering a seamless customer experience, formidable hurdles exist. Incompatible technologies, for one. Marketers may be surrounded by tons of buyer data, but much of it is disconnected siloed in disparate systems, scattered among an average of 17 or more tools. This makes it pretty difficult to perform advanced analytics, which marketers need to identify the most valuable prospects and personalize their interactions with them.
Even if companies were able to integrate all customer data across systems throughout their organizations, their records may not match up neatly. Through MDM, marketers can cut through the data-ridden chaos and interconnect disparate data points, paving the way to delivering an amazing customer experience.
Learn more about how D&B can help bring your organization’s data into one harmonious whole.