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102 . IMAGES RETAIL . NOVEMBER 2015

Knowing your customer, and now every individual customer, is core to taking key decisions and developing strategies and improving products, etc. to directly or indirectly improve your top line or bottom line.By Sreejit Menon

About the author:Sreejit Menon - Program Director & Practice

Head at Happiest Minds.Happiest Minds is the youngest information technology (IT) services

company in India.

KNOW YOUR DIGITAL CUSTOMER FROM CUSTOMER TO SOCIAL TO DIGITAL MDM

In traditional Analytics, customers were segmented on various vectors and combinations like loyalty, usage, average revenue, life time value, visit frequency,

etc. and strategies and offerings were rolled out at a segment, or in more mature cases, at micro-segment levels. This was perhaps effective till such time channels and business models started to evolve and change with Digital Strategies and Transformations coming into play in an enterprise.

While a key part of Customer Experience Management is about understanding the Customer Impacting processes and Interaction levels based on the Industry specifi c customer life cycle and touch points (a top-down approach), knowing every individual customer has become an imperative now (bottom-up approach) and not just knowing the customer from a demographic, geographic, transactional, survey based or web based enterprise level characteristics and behavior, but including the digital behavior and infl uence on social platforms, mobile applications, forums, blogs, etc.

Hence the combination of the Top-Down and Bottom-Up would enable an optimal Personalization, Business Effi ciency and Innovative Business Model led Customer Experience Enrichment.

Therefore, while Social MDM for Social CRM was about mashing up Enterprise Data with Customer Social Data, Digital Master Data Management is going far beyond Social MDM, which was limited to analysis of Social Networks and Social Behavior, to include all Digital Platforms and Properties to get a rich and diverse understanding of the customer including their behavior, preferences, dislikes, network, etc. which helps not only in enhancing the customer experience but also providing newer avenues for revenue generation via better cross-sell / up-sell or for new profi table customer acquisition, growth and retention, etc.

The challenges of knowing the customer outside the enterprise includes, but is not limited to : Incomplete Information such as Demographic details missing, Contact Details (email, phone, etc.) missing; Multiple or Duplicate Identities including multiple profi les, emails, etc. or common profi les used by multiple users; Incorrect Information in the form or Fake or Aspirational or Astroturfi ng profi les, unintended typographical errors, etc.

A robust Structured + Unstructured Data Analytics coupled with a Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities empowering a Multi-Structured MDM would enable the solution to be automated to a large extent as a real-time or near real-time integration with the CRM, Campaign Management and all other Customer

Intelligence dependent systems for democratizing actionable insights internally to all key stakeholders and even allowing the organization to monetize this new enriched customer insights in a secure regulatory compliant manner (like aggregated insights at a geographical/location or age or income or spending segments as an example) ,if needed, as an additional revenue stream in their specifi c industry.

Hence Multi-Structured MDM powered by Big Data and Data Science / Machine Learning and NLP is key to knowing and putting your digital customer at the heart of your business!