Improve Business Performance

Customer relationship management is the first place to look to see if your organization suffers from customer data disorder. CRM, whether home grown or with packaged software, sustains the business functions that market, sell, fulfill and support your goods and services – the relationships with your customers. Poor quality of data is the number one issue citied in the failure of CRM. Business symptoms of customer data disorder include:

Customer satisfaction scores and churn rates do not move substantially
Increased conversion rates at point of contact and lower acquisition costs do not materialize
Cost to market to and serve customers continues to increase

The front office depends upon information and analysis from the back office. The "warehouse" is often used to describe a collection of functions that include basic reporting, segmentation, "what if" analysis, predictive models, risk management and reporting to comply with regulations and legislation like Sarbanes Oxley. Business symptoms of CDD in the warehouse include:

Inability to understand the number of products owned by customer and the patterns of adoption
Inability to understand customer lifetime value
Difficulty predicting the next best offer and likelihood to accept
Reporting results for "customer" in conflict from different sources

Between the front office and the back office most every organization implements a cross reference of customer to account information. These solutions go by many acronyms like CIF (customer information file), CDB (customer database) and MDB (marketing database). In many cases the only legitimate customer to account cross reference is managed by a marketing service bureau. Over the last few years the umbrella term CDI (customer data integration) has been used to describe software and services to implement these solutions. Lately CDI has given way to MDM (master data management) to make room for other important enterprise domains like product and chart of accounts. Regardless of what you call it business symptoms that all is not well include:

The business could never agree on definitions for customer, relationships and hierarchies across functions and brands
Took too long to bring party data sources into the repository
Inability to bind legacy systems to the repository at the transaction level

Party data quality in the enterprise

Party Data Quality in CRM

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