From Customer Cleanup to Data Governance
MDM Insights
Information Management Special Reports, July 17, 2008
It’s a long journey from the first efforts of “customer cleanup” to a full-fledged data governance program. But that’s where many companies start. They gradually accept that there are issues with their customer data such as:
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- A lack of consistently applied standards and controls,
- Problems arising from conversion of customer data from acquired companies,
- Lack of ownership of customer data,
- Invalid addresses leading to undelivered and returned mail or
- Customer service problems caused by large numbers of duplicate and inaccurate records.
So they form a committee, hire a consulting firm, and involve their internal IT folks. That’s a great start, but it’s important to realize that this is not a once-and-done project.
My experience shows that when companies clean up their customer data to a specific point in time and then stop, within two years, their data is back to its original state or worse. So the one-time customer cleanup project has to morph into an ongoing customer data quality way of life.
A good first step is to restrict the number of people who have the ability to add or change customers. This typically sets off lots of howling from various areas of the business. But if everyone in the company has the ability to add or change a customer, then everyone in the company has the ability to mangle customer data too.
It’s hard to have accountability for customer data quality when it’s everyone’s job and no one’s responsibility. So a small, dedicated group of people who live, eat, breathe, sleep and dream about customer data is necessary. These people, referred to as “data stewards,” are an essential part of a data governance program.
The first step is realizing you have a problem, and the next step is organizing resources and funding to fix it. Plan for a small, dedicated group on an ongoing basis to manage and be responsible for the quality of your customer information. Then, start thinking about what they’re going to do and how they’re going to do it.
If you’re not already using any data quality tools, they can be incredibly helpful. What tends to overwhelm people is the sheer number of customer records with problems. Anything you can do to automate the process of consolidating, cleansing, correcting and completing customer data will act as a force multiplier, allowing your small data stewardship team to be more productive and fix more problems in a given period of time.
Enriching your customer data with an external content provider like D&B or Acxiom can also be a big help. People in your organization would probably find Standard Industrial Classification Codes, number of employees, annual sales revenue and other pieces of data useful. If your customer data has those fields at all though, it’s almost certain that the majority of them are blank. Salespeople and others within the enterprise just don’t have time to look them up for every new customer. A content provider can fill in the missing fields and provide more sophisticated things like corporate hierarchies, financial statements and credit and risk ratings.
Now that you’ve got a small group of people working in an organized, disciplined way, using a data quality tool as well as an external content provider to correct and complete customer records, you’ll be able to deduplicate your customer data, arrange customers into their corporate families, achieve higher yields from marketing campaigns, more accurately target customers for cross-sell and upsell efforts, etc.
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