Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

CHAPTER 1

Executives Flying Blind

You can’t understand the future without knowing something about the present. Knowing the characteristics of your customers, partners, and suppliers—who they are, where they are, how they interact with your company, and how you support them—can shape every aspect of your company’s strategy and operations, right down to the individuals you target and the products you pitch.

As customer relationship management (CRM) enters the mainstream, companies continue to struggle with finding, gathering, and integrating information about their customers. Unlike other business challenges that require automation, integrating customer data isn’t an obvious call for brute force programming—it’s clearly a problem for management.

What executives don’t know can not only hurt them, it could send them to jail. In the “information age,” there are fewer excuses for ignorance, especially when it comes to corporate performance. But there are also significant barriers to knowledge, and these barriers haven’t been toppled by the latest juggernaut of packaged software solutions like CRM. In this chapter, we examine what’s holding companies back from understanding their customers at a holistic level. Customer information isn’t destiny, but it’s close.