Unlock Customer Insights by Cleaning Salesforce Data

Like many retailers, this multi-billion dollar office retail and services giant with stores worldwide had aggressively invested in and grown its online business. Its customer-driven site offers functionality to delight customers and keep them coming back for more — like persistently viewable shopping carts, personalized shopping lists, and precision search.

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The success of its e-commerce efforts meant the retailer was flush with high-value but messy data about its customers and their unique buying behaviors. Critical customer information was siloed in multiple systems across the organization, like Salesforce, customer rewards programs, business data accounts, and data enrichment sources like Everstring and Dun & Bradstreet. As a result, key customer insights like product and service preferences, purchase volume and frequency, and buying decision dynamics were obscured.

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Current customer data management processes were failing and costing time and money. The business realized that having complete, accurate, and up-to-date data was key to improving sales and marketing effectiveness and turned to Tamr to master customer data. By moving to an AI-native mastering solution, the retailer now effectively curates and enriches its customer data at scale, enabling improved competitive selling and customer experience initiatives.

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The Problem: Critical Customer Insight and Revenue Opportunities Go Unseen Because of Bad Data

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Good customer service is a vital part of the retailer’s brand promise. The retailer invested heavily in technologies to capture and visualize its abundant customer data. Among these investments was a rules-based master data management (MDM) solution that attempted to gather and curate customer and prospect data across Salesforce and 11 other data sources to deliver a single view of the customer.

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As with any large-scale, rules-based system, operationalizing it and delivering results required dozens of skilled engineers and even more business users to not just build but also fix and maintain the datasets. For example, when a business user noticed duplicate or incorrect records in Salesforce, manual coding to update the rules and push changes could take months!

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Tamr’s Solution: Mastering Diverse Customer Data at Scale 

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Recognizing the problems and limitations of their manual system, the retailer turned to AI-native MDM technology from Tamr. With Tamr’s Customer 360 solution in place, the retailer:

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• Identified nearly 40% duplicate records across operational systems and Salesforce instances, which were obscuring insight and contributing to the high total cost of ownership
• Curated millions of unique customer records from 11 sources — both Salesforce and operational data sources
• Enriched data to produce clustered and segmented customer views, enabling marketing and sales ops to sort by territory or industry
• Replaced a dated, slow, and expensive process that was constraining business growth with a highly scalable, flexible, and much faster process
• Clustered customer views at both the site level and contact level, allowing sales and marketing to segment their outreach and customize offers

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Using Tamr to automatically assign a permanent Customer ID to each unique record, the retailer prevents “data drift” as the business grows and adds new customers and data.

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The retailer now has a disciplined, scalable system for ongoing, automated curation that can meet its ambitious B2B and B2C sales and marketing initiatives.

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Generating Trustworthy and Actionable Customer Data at Scale

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By moving to modern customer data mastering with Tamr, the retailer streamlined its sales process and now trusts business data to inform decisions. With Tamr, the retailer was able to:

• Efficiently market to its customers with personalized messages based on the mastered customer data 
• Unify customer views across all digital and physical touchpoints, significantly improving sales productivity and performance
• Enhance existing customer experiences by leveraging clean and accurate data about consumer and enterprise purchasing behavior
• Improve business flexibility and responsiveness with ongoing access to clean, curated, and up-to-date customer data

“It’s helped us to align the data organization so we can continually deliver more data value to Sales and Marketing, from the business process and our technology.” - VP of Enterprise Data, Analytics, and Architecture

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A Look to the Future

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“Before, we didn’t have enough time to focus on improving the data quality. With Tamr, we’re now able to maximize the quality of the data that we have.” - VP of Enterprise Data, Analytics, and Architecture

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As the retailer expands the data it cleans and curates with Tamr, the company plans to use its new customer data agility to improve the customer experience through more targeted campaigns and marketing initiatives.