The Power of Real-Time APIs in Data Unification

Summary:

• Customer expectations are evolving rapidly, requiring businesses to have real-time access to unified production data for critical insights.
• Traditional MDM solutions are slow and struggle to scale, making real-time APIs essential for resolving entities in production data instantly.
• Real-time APIs enable dynamic user experiences, enhance customer experiences, reduce redundant data, and improve data quality.
• Tamr RealTime provides real-time APIs for entity resolution at scale, preventing duplicate data and delivering immediate insights.
• Old Mutual achieved exceptional customer insights and prevented bad data creation using Tamr RealTime, showcasing the power of real-time APIs in operationalizing data.

Customer expectations are evolving faster than ever before. To stay ahead, businesses need access to real-time, unified data that offers critical and actionable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and trends – and they often need this information immediately. But too often, production data is captured in multiple ways across multiple systems, making it difficult to know which entity is the most accurate and trustworthy.

For years, traditional master data management (MDM) aimed to solve this challenge. But because traditional MDM is rules-based, resolving entities across disparate systems would take weeks – or even years – to complete. And when data changed, which it inevitably did, rules-based MDM struggled to scale. 

To overcome this challenge, organizations today must have the ability to resolve entities in real time, providing instant access to the golden records needed to power analytics and operations, make more informed decisions, and adapt quickly as needs evolve. 

Real-time APIs, like those provided by Tamr RealTime, play a crucial role in providing companies with a deeper, more immediate understanding of their critical business entities across disparate systems and silos. From accessing accurate, trustworthy insights for decision-making to powering customer-facing applications, real-time APIs are an essential bridge connecting production data to the applications and processes that rely on it. 

The Importance of Real-Time APIs in Data Unification

Real-time APIs allow systems and applications to exchange and process production data instantly. Unlike traditional APIs, real-time APIs enable continuous, immediate communication between systems, ensuring that data is sent and received in near-instantaneous timeframes. They facilitate more dynamic and responsive user experiences because they eliminate lag time, providing access to the latest data as soon as it is available instead of waiting for a batch process to run and update the information. 

Gaining immediate access to refreshed data is crucial, especially when data lives within multiple systems and silos within an organization. Having real-time access to the latest information provides a myriad of benefits, including: 

• Enhanced customer experiences: with instantaneous access to the latest customer information, including demographic data and behavioral data, companies can deliver personalized experiences and tailored support.
• Less redundant data: using real-time APIs, businesses can spot duplicates while the data is still in motion, enabling them to resolve entities and merge records before dupes enter their production data sets.
• Better data quality: when companies eliminate duplicate data, they increase the accuracy and reliability of the data which, in turn, drives greater usage and trust. 

Operationalize Your Data in Real Time

Modern business happens in real time. But traditional MDM solutions are stuck in batch-processing mode, making it virtually impossible for organizations to gain instant access to accurate, mastered views of their data. 

With Tamr RealTime, however, everything changes. Tamr RealTime provides the real-time APIs needed to enable entity resolution at scale, delivering mastered, golden records in milliseconds within your CRM, ERP, and other operational applications. As a result, organizations can tap into trustworthy golden records that deliver immediate insights and drive better, more informed decision-making. 

Further, Tamr RealTime prevents duplicate data from entering your production systems in the first place. Using the “search before create” workflow, Tamr RealTime employs artificial intelligence (AI) and semantic search to identify existing records that are a potential match for the new entity. Using a human-guided feedback loop, users can catch potential duplicates early and prevent them entering production data sets, preserving the integrity of the existing data. 

Here’s a closer look at Tamr RealTime’s ”search before create” workflow:

1. The sales team enters a new record into Salesforce called “XYZ Corp, Cambridge.” 
2. The record “XYZ Corp, Cambridge” also goes into Tamr as the central authority.
3. The contracts team then enters a record into SAP called “XYZ Corporation, MA.”
4. Using Tamr RealTime, the contracts team can search Tamr for entities that match “XYZ Corporation, MA” at the point of data entry. In this case, the search returns a match.
5. Because Tamr recognizes that “XYZ Corp, Cambridge” and “XYZ Corporation, MA” are the same, it applies merge rules and updates the record so it is a mastered, enriched entity called “XYZ Corporation, Cambridge, MA.”

The Power of Real-Time Customer Insights at Old Mutual

Old Mutual, a large, leading African financial services group, is driven by the desire to deliver the exceptional experiences its customers expect. But in order to do so, they needed access to real-time, mastered views of their customers across its myriad of production systems and silos. Using Tamr RealTime, Old Mutual gained access to a mastered view of every entity, giving the firm comprehensive customer insights that often take months or years to achieve using traditional MDM solutions. In addition, they also stopped the creation of bad data in the first place using Tamr RealTime’s “search before create” workflow. 

As a result of using Tamr RealTime, Old Mutual achieved results such as the ability to:

• Advise clients on the latest products and policy updates using immediate access to real-time data that reflects the most up-to-date information Old Mutual has to offer.
• Understand a client’s holistic household view, including current beneficiaries, so they can bundle discounts, simplify communications, assess risk, and upsell additional offerings. 
• Identify duplicate data at the point of entry, including data from new sources such as WhatsApp, using persistent, unique IDs. 
• Detect fraudulent behavior in real time so they can prevent false claims and reduce risk to the business. 

Providing users with access to real-time data is no longer a luxury but rather a necessity in today’s fast-paced, customer-driven world. Businesses that use real-time APIs to harness the power of their production data to deliver immediate insights are able to make smarter decisions, respond to changing conditions instantly, and deliver personalized experiences that keep customers engaged. 

To learn more, access this customer story where Old Mutual shares, in their own words, the results they’ve achieved with Tamr.