But explain all this to an attendee at a CRM or an ERP conference and you may get a blank stare or, worse, a dismissive roll of the eyes. You're one of those data zealots, and they'd much prefer to simply get back to developing their customer dashboard, thank you very much. After all, that's what the users really want.
CRM practitioners, for instance, are gradually learning that data isn't an afterthought. As operational CRM systems enter the mainstream, executives are turning their attention to analytical CRM. With the encouragement of CRM vendors, many of whom are watching revenues for their core products wane, managers are exploring how to leverage the newly generated information from their sales force automation and campaign management systems, among others, to reach new levels of customer understanding and increase customer loyalty.
But as data warehouse practitioners have known for a long time, developing analytical systems is a vastly different undertaking than building operational ones and the distinctions can mean the difference between successful business intelligence and a scrapped project.
Everything Old is New Again
Enter the new era of customer data integration. In many ways CDI is a natural outgrowth of several established disciplines, largely IT-based, but with far-reaching business impact. They are:
- Data Integration
- Data Warehousing
- Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)
- ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading)
- Data Quality
- Business Intelligence
Here's a formal definition of CDI:
Customer Data Integration (CDI) is the collection of processes, controls, automation and skills necessary to standardize and integrate customer data originating from different sources to support a variety of business initiatives.
A core tenet of CDI is the creation of what's usually referred to as a "360-degree view," but in CDI circles has come to be known as a "customer data hub." Said hub is really an integrated customer database that incorporates automation of data quality, correction and correlation prior to physically storing the customer data in the hub's database. The customer data hub can also be known as the "master customer reference database," or even simply the "one true view."
Before you dismiss CDI as just a vendor-driven ploy to repackage and sell more software, consider this:
- Your sales executives can't intelligently assign territories because no one knows the difference between a "parent company" and a "billing entity."
- Your company's marketing department claims CRM success but still spends almost a hundred thousand dollars a year on duplicate postage.
- Your sales partners are cannibalizing each other's prospecting activities and their (your) customers are confused.
- Your company just acquired a competitor, and someone needs to reconcile customers across accounts and addresses.
- Your call center representatives are assigning redundant trouble tickets because they're not sure who the right customer is.
- You just received a letter thanking you for your purchase from a company you've never done business with.
- No one is using the (multimillion dollar) CRM system anymore. They just don't trust the data.
These are all symptoms of a larger problem of customer data - usually originating from multiple places - that has not been well integrated. The bad news is that most CRM vendors didn't see it coming or, worse, over-hyped their technologies to include claims of a "single version of the truth" where there wasn't one.
The good news is that CDI is filling a market need. Many companies have realized that their initial customer-focused business initiatives were only band-aids covering a much larger wound. CDI promises a sustainable remedy, and not a moment too soon.
Data Integration: Still a Big Deal
You'd think they would have solved it by now. After all, it's not like data integration is new to companies. Since the advent of data warehousing in the 1980s, and even before then, IT departments have rolled up their sleeves to reconcile data from multiple sources in an effort to provide business people with meaningful information from their production systems that could be strategically useful.
