What’s Next After You Get the Customer Right?

In our efforts to identify unique customers, so we can target and cross-sell, we ultimately come to the next big step in the retail information supply chain: product data. Then of course, right after product data is vendor data. To excel at direct marketing you need to have cleansed and consolidated customer data, such as names, titles, addresses, and other contact info. But what about the product or service you are offering?

If you are an on-line cataloger or large manufacturer of a large retail product line you know that matching the right product to the right customer can be just as challenging as matching one customer to another across disparate data sources. The challenge is compounded when the manufacturer has five separate but similar product lines, like sporting goods lines, eye glass frame brands, or consumer electronics. Added to the compounding is product portfolio rationalization after a merger and acquisition. Simply said, your marketing department may have a good handle on a single view of the customer in the CRM system, but your view of product data across the disparate ERP and catalog systems is a mess.

Typically at this point the focus of the data management effort shifts from customer to product, and then in an effort to reconcile competing, opposing, or seemingly similar products, vendor data is added to the equation. Vendor data, depending on the business, can range from name and address of the supplier to chemicals used in production process and parts used in the component assembly. The data cleansing and consolidation operation has now decidedly shifted from attributes about human beings to attributes about products such as color, size, features, variants, classes, categories, prices, etc.

Because optimizing the retail information supply chain can be daunting, SAP and Utopia have decided to offer a Webinar on September 7 that delves into how to manage and cleanse the data in this chain. Join us in learning about the issues and techniques in solving this challenge, specifically:

• Key retail-industry trends and opportunities
• How consolidating product and vendor data is key to success in retailing
• How to overcome obstacles in data quality to enable data governance

We’ll be able to cover much more ground than in this blog post, and carry the discussion to the next step.

Find further information on the Webinar here.

Frank Dravis, Marketing Leader, Utopia, Inc.