Single Customer View (SCV)
This is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organisation about its customers. The advantage to an organisation of attaining this unified view comes from the ability it gives to analyse past behaviour in order to better target and personalise future customer interactions. A single customer view is also considered especially relevant where organisations engage with customers through multiple channels, since customers expect those interactions to reflect a consistent understanding of their history and preferences. However, some commentators have challenged the idea that a single view of customers across an entire organisation is either natural or meaningful, proposing that the priority should instead be consistency between the multiple views that arise in different contexts.
Where representations of a customer are held in more than one system, achieving a single customer view can be difficult: firstly because customer identity must be traceable between the records held in those systems, and secondly because anomalies or discrepancies in the customer data must be resolved. As such, the acquisition by an organisation of a single customer view is one potential outcome of successful Master Data Management. Since December 2010, maintaining a single customer view has become mandatory for UK banks and other deposit takers due to new rules introduced by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
Master Data Management (MDM)
In business master data management (MDM) comprises the processes, governance, policies, standards and tools that consistently defines and manages the critical data of an organisation to provide a single point of reference.
The data that is mastered may include:
In computing, an MDM tool can be used to support master data management by removing duplicates, standardizing data (mass maintaining), incorporating rules to eliminate incorrect data from entering the system in order to create an authoritative source of master data. Master data are the products, accounts and parties for which the business transactions are completed. The root cause problem stems from business unit and product line segmentation, in which the same customer will be serviced by different product lines, with redundant data being entered about the customer (aka party in the role of customer) and account in order to process the transaction. The redundancy of party and account data is compounded in the front to back office life cycle, where the authoritative single source for the party, account and product data is needed but is often once again redundantly entered or augmented.
MDM has the objective of providing processes for collecting, aggregating, matching, consolidating, quality -assuring, persisting and distributing such data throughout an organization to ensure consistency and control in the ongoing maintenance and application use of this information.
The term recalls the concept of a master file from an earlier computing era.
