Customer Data Management

Abstract As the business complexity, number of customers continues to grow and customers evolve into multinational organisations that operate across borders, many companies are faced with great challenges in the way they manage their customer data. In today’s business, a single customer may have a relationship with several entities of an organisation, which means that the customer data is collected through different channels. One customer may be described in different ways by each entity, which makes it difficult to obtain a unified view of the customer. In companies where there are several sources of data and the data is distributed to several systems, data environments become heterogenic. In this state, customer data is often incomplete, inaccurate and inconsistent throughout the company. This thesis aims to study how organisations with heterogeneous customer data sources implement the Master Data Management (MDM) concept to achieve and maintain high customer data quality. The purpose is to provide recommendations for how to achieve successful customer data management using MDM based on existing literature related to the topic and an interview-based empirical study. Successful customer data management is more of an organisational issue than a technological one and requires a top-down approach in order to develop a common strategy for an organisation’s customer data management. Proper central assessment and maintenance processes that can be adjusted according to the entities’ needs must be in place. Responsibilities for the maintenance of customer data should be delegated to several levels of an organisation in order to better manage customer data.