With the introduction of digitization, the Indian retail market has strengthened over the years. The savviest retailers follow omnichannel approaches that blend offline & online mediums to engage customers. While advanced technology is continuously ruling and revolutionizing the brick-and-mortar and online retail world, retail master data management (MDM) plays an important role in empowering retailers to automate mundane processes and save on both time and costs.
The advent of master data management services has supercharged the retailer’s ability to deliver hyper-personalized offerings and experiences. MDM consists of data cleansing, transformation, and enabling businesses to reduce application integration costs, enhance customer experience, and generate actionable analytic insights. With enterprise data management services, retailers can benefit from data transparency, operational agility, higher data integrity, etc.
In the retail industry, data management solutions play a crucial role wherein delivering connected customer experiences across different market channels is a key factor of market success. As the powerhouse of the most valuable information of any business, master data management offers numerous benefits. With a retail master data management system, business users gain the power to access a comprehensive source of retail data and achieve elevated levels of service. Mastering your data means providing higher efficiency, reducing product returns, growing product catalog, boosting sales, increasing customer loyalty, and addressing business-critical issues.
Let us read about how MDM helps businesses make accurate and timely decisions making by offering various benefits:
Product efficiency and cost-effectiveness: With an MDM system, it is easier for businesses to address the challenges of manual data management, data discrepancy, redundant data, high costs, and time-consuming business processes. In the long term, MDM practices help save money, time, and untold error costs involved in processing master data manually. Holistic data powers business processes with increased information required to ensure product efficiency, save on manual operating costs and reduce error-prone processes. Efficient data management streamlines all business processes to attract new customers who are channel-agnostic.
Reduces product returns in online retail: Winning customers based on their preferences across different channels is extremely important. High levels of data quality hold significance to ensure customer-centricity and offer personalized marketing, and respond in real-time. An MDM ecosystem supports customer-centricity by gaining access to 360 customer view and order history, discovering gaps between data, and gaining insights into customers’ requirements. MDM solutions make returns, order tracking, purchases, and customer support easier and generate tangible results. With data-driven systems ensuring consistency and integrity, retailers can cut costs on ineffective new product trials and therefore, build rich customer profiles.
Accelerates cross-selling and upselling: Retailers can also benefit from the MDM system’s capability to increase cross-selling and upselling of business offerings. An MDM platform offers a holistic vision to maximize customer spending by promoting complimentary products & services and enhancing customer experience in all marketing channels. Also, access to high-quality data helps retailers build effective cross-selling strategies and achieve long-term growth for the company.
Improves Data Compliance: With legal policies and government regulations getting stricter over time, efficient data storage and management are vital to any data-driven business. Non-compliance with data regulations can further cause implications, in turn, leading to penalties and loss of regulation. The use of master data management services lessens the possibility of security breaches and data compliance. The fear of regulatory compliance risk keeps many businesses from using their data to its full capabilities. Regulations can become tedious and stricter, however, data enterprise management makes tracking compliance smooth & simple.
Return on master data management: In the retail segment, the return on your MDM depends on the business challenges it is intended to overcome. Generally, growing the product catalog, enhancing product quality, and increasing speed-to-market will certainly strengthen operational efficiency, reduce product returns, and improve customer experience.
Increases Data Accuracy: MDM cuts off duplication and inconsistency in the database. Given that any discrepancy in master data management can have a ripple effect on different business areas, it is very important to get it right at the master data level. Therefore, it enables a proper data structure leading to a reduction in the risk of data accuracy. Retailers need accurate, precise, consistent, and quality customer data readily available, and well-architected master data management offers all the advantages to retailers to make informed decisions quickly.
Wrapping up
Technically advanced master data management services are the need of the hour and inevitably, the above-listed advantages it brings are just the tip of the iceberg. A systematized retail master data allows multiple sources to aggregate together smoothly in real-time. We believe that the MDM platform touches every corner of a business by providing a consistent data stewardship experience and a higher return on investment. Also, master data has the ability to power your business transformation by giving round-the-clock access to customer interactions and social engagements. Enterprise data management services put technical constraints on altering customer records and preventing fraud/suspicious entries occuring in subsequent operational processes. MDM is a key enabler to help businesses master their database with an affordable and scalable platform.
The next normal is taking shape and retailers have much ground to cover and master data management services are of the essence. With a well-organized MDM system in place, Polestar ensures that retailers will make confident decisions and strengthen their ties to customers.