Wipro’s experts share how to accelerate Customer 360 for less

Wipro is a leading information technology, consulting, and business process services company that delivers solutions to enable its clients do business better. Wipro delivers winning business outcomes through its deep industry experience and a 360-degree view of "Business through Technology.” Wipro is also a trusted global system integrator (GSI) partnered with Talend, a Qlik company.  

Purushottam Joshi and Kamaldeep Bajaj from Wipro join Talend’s Head of GSI Partner Engineering to share their insights about optimizing technology to establish Customer 360 programs. 

Why is master data management critical? 

Bad data, plagued by duplicate and inconsistent information, has emerged as a formidable challenge for businesses and their customers alike. If your business uses a wide set of interfaces for onboarding customer data, the necessity of a trustable, single view of your customer has never been more pressing.  

When bad data infiltrates into systems, processes, and customer interactions, it can create a host of problems. From inaccurate analytics and ineffective targeting to subpar customer experiences, businesses face the risk of missing out on truly immersive and personalized engagements with their customers.  

To overcome these challenges and capitalize on the full potential of their data, businesses must prioritize the establishment of a robust Customer 360 strategy. This is why master data management (MDM) is so critical, and it’s necessary to bring IT and business together with the right MDM for your needs. 

Customers bear the brunt of bad data 

Organizations miss a lot of marketing opportunities and sales because of bad data quality. Considering the data stored in multiple business units; there is no single view of the customer experience. This leads to poor decision making, and customers bear the brunt of bad data. 

Duplicate and inconsistent information disrupt customer experiences. Imagine the same customer has been met by multiple marketing teams of the same organization for different purposes in different time periods. This will confuse the customer and increase the company’s operating costs.  

Trust in a brand can quickly erode when customers are bombarded with inconsistent or irrelevant information, leaving them feeling undervalued and overlooked. When customer experiences suffer, customer retention becomes a major issue.   

What can go wrong without Customer 360? 

Consider these examples of how organizations and their customers suffer when they fail to establish a robust Customer 360 strategy. 

Telecom: In today’s competitive business, every service provider tries to delight their customers and bring down customer churn by providing a good discount on their total spend for the service they use. If an organization does not have a unified master customer data, it will not be able to efficiently bring the total customer-availed services and spend amount to provide a good discount, hence customer churn will happen, and business will be lost. 

Commercial Pharma: Informed call planning is vital for a sales team working with healthcare professionals. If the system that sellers rely on does not have unified and unique healthcare professional data, multiple sales teams could end up meeting the same healthcare professional at different times and talking about the same product. Listening to the same product information from multiple sales teams over different time periods would cause discomfort rather than confidence. 

What are the pros and cons of off-the-shelf master data management tools? 

Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) MDM solutions offer a range of benefits for organizations seeking to consolidate their master data. Over time, some MDM vendors have built specialized vertical data models purpose-built for certain set of industry use cases. But don’t get locked into a niche solution without carefully weighing these considerations: 

1. Customization limitations: Some MDM solutions have rigid data models that become expensive to customize.
2. Integration complexity: Integrating a COTS MDM solution with existing systems, applications, and data sources can be complex. Organizations may encounter compatibility issues, data mapping challenges, and inconsistencies that require them to work with ETL or application integration tools to assemble a complete solution.
3. Scalability limitations: As businesses grow and their data volumes increase, the ability to keep pace with increasing data volumes and demands becomes critical.
4. Total cost of ownership (TCO): Organizations should carefully evaluate all costs, including licensing fees, implementation costs, maintenance, and ongoing support to ensure the solution aligns with their budgetary constraints in the present and in the long term. Most MDM projects will need additional hardware plus point solutions including ETL, data quality, and application integration — which increases the TCO. 

In our experience, top implementation challenges include:  

• How to achieve a Customer 360 view, pulling data from multiple applications using batch or real time
• How to maintain data integrity between the attributes necessary for a Customer 360 view
• How to integrate and facilitate seamless communication, in batch or real time, between the application of CRM, Transaction, and MDM systems
• How to bring the latest changed data of customers, such as phone, email, address, and communication preferences, into MDM systems
• How to identify and prevent duplication of customer data from different sources and different periods
• How to create a single view of a golden record for the customer 

How to customize a more flexible, scalable MDM at lower cost 

While it may be tempting to buy a ready-made solution off the shelf, the costs and questions add up. Instead, you could leverage Talend’s Data Fabric solution to build a custom, end-to-end MDM without any additional or hidden costs. Here is a sample approach:

1. Integration: Data integration is the first critical step. You need to be able to bring the data from heterogenous data sources without any friction. Talend Data Fabric connects to over 300 SaaS tools, databases, and endpoints in a seamless out of the box fashion. This eliminates handwritten code and customizations, saving significant setup and maintenance costs.   Built-in transformation features provide the flexibility to add logic and filters to incoming data, so data integration becomes a frictionless experience. Talend also comes to the rescue with capabilities to parse and flatten hierarchical data formats and semi-structured data formats.
2. Business user inputs: Talend provides interfaces for business users as part of the Data Fabric product suite. Talend Data Preparation helps business users clean the data and document rules. Those rules can then be reused by technical teams to achieve data preparation at scale.
3. Data quality: With the power of Talend’s in-flight data quality, you don’t have to stage the data to perform validation, verification, and enrichment. Built-in data quality features help you standardize and enrich data with external libraries.
4. Matching: Talend Data Quality provides out-of-the-box (OOTB) libraries for matching across disparate data systems. A true fuzzy-matching algorithm helps identify duplicates.
5. Survivorship: When you have duplicate data, survivorship rules are key to determining what goes into the golden record. Talend’s configurable thresholds give you a way to define survivorship rules in the case of identified duplicates. With Talend Data Stewardship, you can also bring a human into the loop to aid in decision making as required, ensuring that your data is vetted by subject matter experts and helping build data trust.
6. Write to destinations: Talend’s connector set makes it easy to store records in a destination of choice such as Snowflake, Amazon Redshift, or Google BigQuery. You can also write the data back into a GraphDB of your choice, should it suit your requirements.
7. Activation layer: This is a critical piece in an MDM solution. You can build a custom MDM application with a platform of your choice. Talend API Services can help you build the data APIs that are required for all the MDM-related operations, including creating a master, updating, deleting, and more. Talend can also be used to update back to applications, for example, Salesforce, through OOTB connectors and APIs. This helps you take the curated master data into the endpoints that data consumers leverage on a daily basis, powering their decisions with trusted data. 

Where to implement master data management with Talend 

The biggest strength of a custom, lightweight MDM solution with Talend is that it will be domain agnostic. In contrast to niche, purpose-built COTS solutions, Talend Data Fabric gives you the flexibility, extensibility, and scalability to support multiple use cases and grow your data management system with your business needs.

When you use Talend, you’ll know that IT will be ready to meet the changing data demands of any line of business, customers, suppliers, vendors, products, reference data, or any other application that needs complete, trusted data. 

Build your data integration strategy with Talend and Wipro 

Whether your end goal is Customer 360 or Product 360, getting there will take a collaborative effort between business and IT. Cooperation is necessary to ensure consistency, accuracy, and accountability of master data assets within an enterprise.  

Talend and Wipro support your data culture with centralized and trustworthy data from various sources without relying on traditional master data management tools. Learn more about Talend’s partnership with Wipro to get started.