“Look after your data. In many cases, it’s all you have got!”
This is how Kennedy Warwick closed his session at our MDM 360 Summit in London this year. Those words of wisdom come from a man who has spent the past 3 years working on the enterprise-wide customer data initiative as the subject matter expert for the Finance & Risk business of Thomson Reuters. The initiative spans 100 countries, five divisions, 60,000 employees, and 6 million customers and prospects.
As a company that bases its business on information, Thomson Reuters has long recognized the strategic value of data.
Kennedy Warwick, Head of Customer Data Strategy and Management, shared with us how Thomson Reuters is solving its customer data challenges on a global scale and in an environment that became even more complex as Thomson Reuters finalized 70 acquisitions over four years (14 of which Kennedy was directly involved with).
A global footprint and many acquisitions will practically guarantee that many groups, processes, and technologies would develop independently across a company. It was no surprise, then, that Thomson Reuters was faced with the challenge of multiple systems managed by different areas, inefficient and manual processes, duplicate records, and lack of governance that made it difficult to work across the organization and have one view of the customer. As an example, Kennedy commented that one customer had 475 different iterations in one country alone.
The Vision: Deliver a Single View of the Customer Worldwide
The company created a vision to deliver a single view of the customer worldwide that could be relied upon by sales, executives, and the business at-large. Not only would this vision of a total view of the customer help Thomson Reuters employees provide the same experience across the entire organization, it would also increase operational efficiency, eliminate many manual processes, and identify critical relationships across the customer base.
“With Informatica and Informatica partner, Entity Group, we’ve been able to realize our vision with the tools and experience we needed to achieve our Enterprise Customer Master,” states Kennedy . “Our ECM enables a complete view of the customer by creating and maintaining customers ‘Golden Record’, a single instance of core customer and prospect data for all of Thomson Reuters. It provides our team with the capabilities to organize and orchestrate customer data across our complex transactional (OTC, CRM) and analytical (EDW) ecosystem. “
Delivering the Vision
Strategically managing and then accurately and securely sharing a single view of customer data has enabled the company to do many things more efficiently as well as many new things, including:
- Recognize complex customer organizational hierarchies for sales and operational alignment
- Help sales teams discover cross-sell and upsell opportunities and cross business unit partnership opportunities
- Expose better information for business decisions, including risk analysis and credit controls
- Answer basic customer service questions in a single call, without the need to transfer across strategic business units
- Support consistent, accurate and intelligent communications with customers, with consistent name and address standards on all customer-facing documents
- Ascertain the top 20 customers across the whole of Thomson Reuters – in less than an hour
- Will provide consolidated invoices and statements to customers, with customer service visibility of all billing activity
- Integrate new data sources in the event of M&A to help identify unique clients
Advice for your Journey
If you’re about to embark on a similar journey at your company, Kennedy also offers a bit of advice. Do your homework. Ensure the data you’re bringing in is trusted, and not constantly questioned, or worse, dismissed. This means cleaning your data in native systems; adding, don’t move the data, then look at 15 million records and try to make sense of it. Show value early and deliver incremental value quickly. Find the meaningful metric that you want to impact. Ensure that you have the necessary technical infrastructure resources in place to support the program. And above all, engage your executive leadership and manage their expectations. This is a strategic project that spans organizational boundaries. Success cannot be achieved without it.
Learn More:
Save the date for our next MDM 360 Summit, to be held in NYC this February 22, 2017, at the Crowne Plaza Times Square. Visit with Informatica at other events and learn where we’ll be by visiting our Events web page.
Read more about how to strategically manage your own customer data in our ebook, The Seven Imperatives for Great Customer Data Management.
The post How Thomson Reuters Improves Customer Experience with Data as a Corporate Asset appeared first on The Informatica Blog - Perspectives for the Data Ready Enterprise.