August 2024
Master data is a critical driver that enables companies to utilise the vast amount of dynamic transactional data. Master data helps every department to deliver their job.
In the current world, the companies which make decisions based on data have a big advantage over companies who don't. But to get good information from data, data quality becomes the key.
In this article we are going to discuss the importance of Customer Master data.
Customer master data includes customer master, customer location master and customer contact person master. These masters are at the heart of sales related transactions. When a customer master is created, a Debtor ledger for the customer is also automatically created in the Accounts module.
All the reports related to sales are also dependent on the quality of master data entered. These reports help you to make informed decisions.
We have been adding Intelligence features to OurSys and in near future such AI or intelligence generating software will be common. But these software feed on data and their effectiveness depends on the quality of the data.
Here are some important sub-masters related to OurSys along with their importance. We request you to update your customer masters wherever the data is incomplete or incorrect.
There are many business groups with multiple companies. Each of these companies is a separate Customer in the master. But these can be clubbed together using the Customer Group master. Example: Mahindra & Mahindra can be a Customer Group which has companies such as Mahindra & Mahindra - Igatpuri, Mahindra & Mahindra - Nagpur, Mahindra & Mahindra - Zaheerabad etc.
You can also use Customer Group to segregate Customers on some other criteria in case group companies scenario does not apply to you.
In OurSys Region master is used to control access of customer data. Regions are linked to Customers as well as Employees. Thus, every sales representative belongs to some region and every customer also belong to some region. A sales representative has access to only customers belonging to the region marked for the sales representative.
One person can have multiple regions. Thus a senior officer can access customer data of multiple regions. Due to this feature your customer data exposure is restricted.
All sales reports can be filtered by region.
Various sources of getting the customer are defined in the Source master. Cold Calling, Exhibitions, Referrals are some of the examples.
Source master helps you analyse which method of Customer acquisition works well. You can marshall your resources accordingly.
This refers to other competing suppliers to a given customer. This information helps to understand the grade of products the customer is looking for. Also, generally, the strengths and weaknesses of competitors are known. Thus it helps in quoting appropriately.
Competitor master is also used in lead management as well.
In case you have a fixed person looking after cases of a given customer, you can use this master to assign your sales representative. This information gets auto populated while booking enquiries and orders for that customer.
The typical currency in which a customer deals is picked using the currency master. You can also set conversion of these currencies to your home currency in the master.
When enquiries and orders are booked, the currency gets selected automatically and pulls the default conversion rate as well.
Currency master is also used in various other places such as Currency wise price lists, Purchase orders and multi-currency accounting vouchers.
It is recommended to grade customers so as to align your resources in the right proportions.
Some grade customers as A+, A, B, C and some others as "Most Important", "Regular", "Non frequent". You may have your own way of grading. But once you grade ot helps in analysing data based on the grades
OurSys also has a Communication feature which reminds sales representatives to get in touch with customers whose activities have not been recorded. The limit depends upon the grade. Example A+ customers have to be in touch every month.
OurSys comes with pre-filled data of list of countries. State and City data is pre-filled only for India as of now.
You can add data to these masters as required. Customer list and further business analysis can be done Country wise, State wise and City wise
Designation may not always indicate the hierarchy of the person in the organisation. Also there is no standardisation in the titles adopted by different companies.
Hence we have provided for Level master. Typical options should be like "Decision Maker / Top Management", "Middle Management", "Executive", "User Department" etc.
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