Golden Customer Data Milestone: NZ MS Customer 360 POC Solution

The ‘Golden Customer’ Project

In this recently completed project, the client had a distinct problem across their branch / franchise network, which had different customer data records across different instances of the same Salesforce CRM systems.

This also manifested in duplicate versions of the same client record; inconsistent or incomplete data points, which was manually consolidated to attempt some central head office marketing reporting as well as ineffective marketing campaigns and reporting.

The Problem

The marketing team will manually attempt to merge and centrally create a ‘golden customer record’, extracting data from the different branches CRM instances. The data will then, once manually collated, be used for campaigns, which often saw contact details bounce back, some high-end customers receiving excessive marketing material etc.  

The business and team have attempted to fix the manual collation of customer records process on a couple of occasions with different solutions, in this instance MS Customer 360, all being unsuccessful.

At the heart of the problem was a mandate to make changes for the right reasons, however without an enterprise and complex system integrations level solution and experience. The devil really was in the detail and as we see often, it is difficult for internal directors across different business units to get the bird’s eye view that ensures effective implementation.

The outside in approach

The complexity of the project clearly needed an experienced problem solving skills approach and background in the best practice IT and complex data delivery.

Our ability to negotiate and influence with the key tech vendor and other stakeholders meant we had access to global data and customer 360 tech solution design experts as part of our delivery team. This complemented and enabled a collaborative cross-functional delivery and more critically the tech skill support from overseas in order to close some local NZ tech capability gaps.

Breaking it down and the outcome

The solution was very complex, entailing a number of tech system integrations, understanding of golden source reference data and data governance business process as well as managing delivery and stakeholders. With limited capacity and a small team, a more flexible agile mind-set was a must in order to get things done.

Our experience in setting up and leading onshore / offshore global teams also gave us the edge in enabling this unprecedented delivery to take off.

This breakdown design allowed the company to complete phase 2 of the POC, which also included the head office’s Dynamics CRM system integration. This completed the loop in creating the golden customer record and the necessary reporting associated with the data.

Increasing complexities in business, operational and technology change, as well as the lack of very specialist local tech knowledge would be adding more to the current woes of failure to deliver in New Zealand.

We believe we are facing significant market shifts, which will only be exacerbated in the current and post-pandemic business environment in 2022 and beyond.

Staying ahead, being agile and coming up with innovative, fast-paced solutions as we are describing above is the competitive edge your organisation needs to stay ahead. Is your business ready for the disruptions that are coming that are beyond the current ‘just cope’ world with Covid-19 uncertainties?

We operate from New Zealand but have a proven record of helping clients globally.