Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

DATA BACK IN THE LIMELIGHT

Ask any CEO about an integrated customer view, and odds are he or she will know what you’re talking about. In fact, most CEOs can probably even cite the consequences of not having that view or the benefits of having it. Consider the three real-life business scenarios in this chapter.

Each of the scenarios described in this chapter represents either a hazard or an opportunity for the company in question. The common denominator is the ongoing struggle to harness and manage the information they have about their customers.

To top it off, customers are more demanding than ever. They understand as well as the companies they do business with that the competition is only a phone call or a mouse click away. And they’ve done business with enough companies who have delighted them to understand what being delighted or even satisfied really means. Companies are increasingly at the mercy of savvy, time-strapped customers with more than enough choices about whom to do business with.

Executives are coming to realize that, for many different reasons, their firms have multiple systems housing customer data. With customer data in different silos, the customers themselves had effectively been siloed. This realization takes many forms, none of them pretty. One director of marketing at a large cosmetics company recently explained it this way:

CASE STUDY: SCENARIO 1

A high-tech company has a strategy of growth through acquisition. The company has been buying smaller ...