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Customer Golden Record

It’s very important to have uninterrupted access to your customer data. And it’s particularly important to have these records on local devices at a time when traditional communication tools do not work anymore and new tools need to be created. The problem is that customer records are often fragmented and poorly structured.          

As a result, profiles of your customers are incomplete and undescriptive, making interaction less effective. You can improve your customer data management using a golden customer record. A golden record combines true customer data collected from different systems and reports.

A golden record provides accurate and complete information on customer actions to all who work with data.         

This tool collects information about one customer from different sources and consolidates it into a unified customer profile. It standardizes and validates the data. This data can be used in analytics and reporting; and then, already cleansed and enriched, transferred back to a source system. The golden record constantly updates the customer data, making it truer, more accurate and more complete, if managed by the right concepts. CDI and MDM are often used to create a golden record.          

To enjoy benefits from the golden record, a business must, first of all, ensure stable and updated data supply from all the sources (departments) to the unified profile. All the fragmented data sources must be consolidated and cleansed to become reliable. It will be helpful if all employees who deal with the data collection and management are involved in the data governance process. IT systems must also be tuned up.     

Golden record benefits for business: 

· Truer, more accurate, more relevant data
· Access to data for any department 
· Data is reliable. Can be used as basis for analysis and assumptions
· Improved database segmentation 
· Omnichannel customer experience

 How to implement a golden record 

 Actions needed before committing to a CDI solution: 

· Develop process documentation. Specify data flows, data sources and types, and ways to use it  
· Create and apply data governance policies. Define rules for data entry, storage and verification, and data reliability principles. 
· Choose proper MDM or CDI. Mind data size, performance requirements, flexibility of business change, etc., when choosing the system.   
Actions needed with CDI implemented:
 · Validate data. Use dictionaries to correct misspellings, combine all the data from disparate sources. This can be done automatically, particularly using a solution by DM Basis for connecting to dozens of sources via API.   
· Remove duplicates. A process for removing duplicate data for one customer.  
· Create ID and record for each customer. Customer data from different sources, validated and without duplicates, is collected into one record which has its order number. The number is then used for enriching the record with new information. A golden record contains not only unified personal data about a client but also an interaction history.   

We have developed Combyx, a Russian CDI solution to create golden record data architecture for any system not requiring serious IT changes.  
 
Combyx is a machine learning tool for structuring data by a customer ID. It provides access to historical data and enriches the information. For example, Combyx can determine the gender and exact name of the customer, apply additional data verification rules and make it possible to trust them. This product can make verification according to any rules. You get the golden record ready for use in the most convenient form through the preferred channel.