Focused Marketing using SAP MDM

Focused Marketing using SAP MDM

Applies to: SAP MDM. For more information, visit the Master Data Management homepage.

Summary Companies use a bouquet of marketing techniques to reach out to the customers. This article explains how MDM can help companies achieve focused, result oriented marketing efforts by providing a single view of consolidated, up to date customer master data across organization.

Author: Kamal Khanna

Company: Wipro Technologies

Created on: 04 September 2008

Author Bio Kamal Khanna is a Business Analyst in Wipro Technologies, working in SAP MDM domain.

SAP DEVELOPER NETWORK | sdn.sap.com BUSINESS PROCESS EXPERT COMMUNITY | bpx.sap.com © 2008 SAP AG 1

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-mdm


Table of Contents Introduction .........................................................................................................................................................3 Business Scenario: .............................................................................................................................................3 To Be Scenario: ..................................................................................................................................................4

Consolidation: .................................................................................................................................................5 Cleansing and de-duplication:.........................................................................................................................6 Harmonization: ................................................................................................................................................8 Product/ service catalog Management:...........................................................................................................9 Analytics........................................................................................................................................................10

Summary...........................................................................................................................................................11 Related Content................................................................................................................................................12 Disclaimer and Liability Notice..........................................................................................................................13



Introduction Companies use a bouquet of marketing techniques to reach out to the customers. They market their product or services to reach out and acquire new customers and at same time try to up sell and cross sell their offerings amongst existing customers. A number of communication channels are used for the same (like telemarketing, front office, internet, customer care etc.).

However these marketing efforts might not be focused enough to fulfill their purpose. They somehow miss out mapping needs of the customer with the right offerings. They select either the wrong set of customers for a particular offering, or end up promoting the wrong offering to customer which does not appeal to them.

Many times this might result when the customer information is fragmented across the organization in silos, preventing any single department to have a 360 degree view of customer. Such disparate information fails to provide valuable insights about the customer spend patterns and prevents the marketing team from making focused decision regarding pricing and customer profiling. Moreover not having access to complete customer information also restricts the support teams to cater to the needs of the existing customers in the most efficient manner.

Business Scenario: Consider the following scenarios:

Credit card customers of a bank facing the following situations:

1. Receiving calls for applying to a new credit card which they already hold

2. The customer care department already having updated contact information but marketing team still using the 2 year old address of customers to send them information about new products.

3. Customer sales executive having no information on newly launched offers and products, which are available on website.

4. Two members of same family are credit card holders of the bank. When one customer enquires with support team for credit limit extension, the sales executives has no access to this information and hence refuses the request, instead of suggesting an offer which is already existing exclusively for family customers of such profile and caters to his needs, This leads to loss of future business opportunity.

Clearly, customer account information was being maintained in silos between different organization units like the marketing departments, call centers, operational support systems etc. Their was no 360 view of the customer and processes were disconnected. Moreover the customer care did not have access to the latest and complete service offerings. Such operational inefficiencies lead to customer dissatisfaction, which no company in today’s competitive market can afford. The lost opportunity can make all the difference.



To Be Scenario: SAP MDM can be used to provide a solution to the above problem. It can be used to create an integrated, clean, up to date repository for customer records which can act as a single source of customer master data records for use by all the departments.

This will enable a single 360 degree view of customer across all the departments thus enabling them to better service the end customer. This combined with online catalog management can enable the sales executive to access all the latest offerings and suggest the one best suited according to the customer profile.

Moreover SAP MDM can help standardize the process of customer master record creation to ensure that no duplicate or incomplete records are created. MDM system when integrated with BI system can be used to provide more accurate reporting and insights to the management to take decisions.

The MDM solution can be designed as:



Consolidation:

MDM can consolidate all the information existing in silos across departments and provide a single, 360 degree view of customer to all the internal users.

Consolidation forms the first stage of the MDM Roadmap. All the data existing in silos in different departments within the organization can be consolidated into a customer repository, where data can be modeled in most effective way by using various features provided by SAP MDM Console (like using hierarchy, taxonomy or qualified tables). Moreover it also offers functionality to identify data coming from various systems and maintains the same using remote key mappings and if need be, uses the same at time of syndication to identify what all data is to be sent to which consuming systems.

SAP MDM

IMPORT

MANAGER

SAP

CRM

Legacy

SAP MDMCustomer repository



Cleansing and de-duplication:

Once all the data has been consolidated into the customer repository, SAP MDM can be used to clean the same and remove duplicates.

SAP MDM Data Manager offers high level of functionality to choose duplicates based not only on a unique field, but also using combination of multiple fields. This functionality helps in achieving more precise results for duplicate search. Data Manager allows you to write business specific rules and strategies which we can run on all or a selected set of records. Using this we can help identify probable duplicates.

For example, consider a scenario when customer information about two different customers is residing separately in ERP and Seibel CRM system as follows:

In ERP1:

First Name Last Name Address

John Mathew Australia 3418, Victoria 31 Nelon Street, North Hill, House No 333

In Siebel, CRM

First Name Middle Name Last Name Address

Celina John Mathew 31 Nelson Street, N. hill, Victoria, Australia 3418

As can be seen, the records contain information in different formats, and also contain some typographical errors. This shows that the data is not clean and there is no organization wide standard defined for storing such information. No insights are available when data resides in this manner across multiple systems.



Now if SAP MDM is used in this scenario, it standardizes the way information is represented across the systems, and cleans the same. Data manager allows you to write validations, rules and strategies to implement specific business requirements. We can use this feature in the above example to identify that both the records actually belong to the members of the same house hold. This information can be useful to generate reports through BI systems and help management better understand the existing customer base and design future offerings customized to such segment of customers. At the same time, this information can also help sales executive to sell their service offerings in a bundled family plan, which would be more appealing to customer, and successfully up selling products.

Such Business requirements can be implemented in SAP MDM by using functionalities like Assignments and validations, workflows and effective matching and merging strategies. When searching for duplicates, SAP Data Manager gives the matching results in form of scores and probability, which aid in further short listing of probable duplicates and taking appropriate actions.



Harmonization:

Once all the records have been consolidated in the customer repository and cleaned, it can then be distributed across consuming systems so that all the systems have the same and complete information. MDM Syndicator offers functionality to customize and select the data to be exported to individual systems, as per requirements of business. That is, we can decide what all data is to be exported to individual client systems. It enables all the end systems to have the same, correct and up to date version of master data.

SAP MDM Syndicator



Product/ service catalog Management:

SAP MDM can use Publisher to maintain an online product/service catalog to increase the visibility of the service offerings to customer service executives.

The product catalog facility can be web enabled and provided using a web interface to the customer care executives. It provides a user friendly search view where executives can quickly search through the offerings and also compare them amongst one another. When the executives have the full details of the customer, they can keep in mind his profile and map his requirements to the products available to suggest the product/ service most suitable to the customer. This not only leads to a happy customer who got the best offering available, but also would help in increased up sell.

Parametric search:

SAP MDM provides a powerful search capability known as drill down search. This can be used to pinpoint and shortlist the desired set of records / offerings amongst all the available in the repository / catalog.

The marketing team can use this feature to easily figure out the target customers for their new product / service introduction. Suppose they are launching the new product in a particular city, say Bangalore. Then they can use the drill down search facility to easily short list the target customers present in Bangalore city, which have a good credit history, in the age range of 25 to 35 years and have monthly card usage of more than Rs.10, 000.

The feature can be integrated with portal to provide easy web enabled access and can enable the marketing team to be more result oriented and focused in its campaigns.

Source: SAP MDM Data Manager Reference guide



Analytics

Companies require to effectively analyzing the customer data available to gain insights about customer preferences and spend patterns. SAP MDM can be integrated with SAP BI, to provide more accurate reporting and give sales and marketing department’s better insights into customer related data which can assist them in designing new offerings to better map the customer requirements. It can also help generate more accurate and focused reporting for higher management and at the same time achieve more focused segmentation and / or pricing decisions.

For e.g.:



Summary The article explains how MDM can help companies achieve effective marketing and more responsive customer service. But the benefits of SAP MDM are not limited only to the same. Various other business benefits that are realizable using SAP MDM are:

• Single view of customer across all channels, enabling effective marketing and more responsive customer support.

• Providing management better insights, using accurate and precise report generation from BI systems due to consolidated and clean master data.

• Standardization of processes (of master data creation) across departments.

• Help implement data governance principles to effectively manage information across organization.

• Enabling better risk management and compliance adherence.



Related Content http://help.sap.com/saphelp_mdmgds55/helpdata/en/43/e0615a82b40a2ee10000000a11466f/frameset.htm

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/45/5d3bfaa9ef3bdfe10000000a1553f7/frameset.htm

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/b0b19d78-fe68-2a10-cdbb-fdc3eb647200

For more information, visit the Master Data Management homepage.


http://help.sap.com/saphelp_mdmgds55/helpdata/en/43/e0615a82b40a2ee10000000a11466f/frameset.htm

http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw70/helpdata/en/45/5d3bfaa9ef3bdfe10000000a1553f7/frameset.htm

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/b0b19d78-fe68-2a10-cdbb-fdc3eb647200

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/nw-mdm



Disclaimer and Liability Notice This document may discuss sample coding or other information that does not include SAP official interfaces and therefore is not supported by SAP. Changes made based on this information are not supported and can be overwritten during an upgrade.

SAP will not be held liable for any damages caused by using or misusing the information, code or methods suggested in this document, and anyone using these methods does so at his/her own risk.

SAP offers no guarantees and assumes no responsibility or liability of any type with respect to the content of this technical article or code sample, including any liability resulting from incompatibility between the content within this document and the materials and services offered by SAP. You agree that you will not hold, or seek to hold, SAP responsible or liable with respect to the content of this document.

Documents

Focused Marketing using SAP MDM