At a very simple level, organisations need to understand who their customers are. This seemingly simple need is often extremely complex, because customers have a habit of moving, aging, making different purchasing decisions – basically being continually evolving data points! And that’s not even to mention those who are trying to hide some aspect of themselves for poor credit reasons, or even to evade detection for the purposes of committing crime.

Many firms therefore use a customer 360 dashboard in order to visualise a customer’s journey, from initial enquiry, through onboarding and into areas including real-time transactions. At a bare minimum, this will require many hundreds of data points covering date and place of birth, nationality, gender, financial and residential history and so on. Much of this data is considered ‘special’ or ‘protected‘ category data, subject to strict controls on storage and use, adding additional headaches for firms seeking to optimise customer experiences and prevent fraud.

For large institutions such as financial services firms, it’s therefore likely they will hold a vast amount of disparate data on a single customer. In order to improve their sales and marketing efforts, as well as internal reporting, it’s crucial to have complete and up to date information on their customers. Through collating and aggregating various datasets into a single source, the customer can receive a better personalised experience and organisations can increase their business intelligence, resulting in improved revenues and reduced financial penalties for non-compliance.

Customer 360 is underpinned by data quality; without reliable and accurate information on a customer, it becomes a challenge to extract valuable customer insights. Alongside the clear reduction in risk, Customer 360 offers organisational benefits, from improved downstream intelligence to more accurate planning and forecasting.

How Datactics can help:

The data matching technology at the heart of Datactics’ Self-Service Data Quality platform is fundamentally important to a Customer 360 programme. Its configurable fuzzy-matching capabilities help customers to identify close and near matches, and using AI can reduce the time spent on manual review by 45%. Read about it here.