In today’s economy, it is imperative to put the customer at the heart of the business; treating each customer as an individual to maximise lifetime value, coupled with the ability to personalise mailings or to send lifestyle information to the right person at the right time is vital to business success.
When you consider that the average business never hears from more than 90% of its unhappy customers, the importance of putting the customer at the heart of the business becomes even more apparent.
Customer Data Integration (CDI), or the process of consolidating and managing customer information from all available sources, if properly carried out, ensures that all relevant departments in the organisation have access to the most current and complete view of customer information.
Most companies have customer data, possibly in disparate database containers which makes it difficult to manage effectively, resulting in out of date and conflicting customer data. Although most companies believe having an integrated view of customer data is critical, only a very small percentage of companies actually manage to achieve this.
The inability to consolidate data from disparate databases results in operational inefficiencies which severely impact on the business and its capacity to compete and grow:
- Inaccurate reporting
- Unconsolidated disparate data sets
- Inefficient use of resources
- Increased mailing costs and cost of postal returns
- Reduced revenue
- Weakened customer service
- Penalties for non-compliance with legislation
Customer Data Integration, linking disparate databases, cross-matching and deduping data to produce a single view of corporate data has immense benefit in terms of corporate transparency and accountability, through elimination of data input errors to create the single customer view, which in turn provides:
- Increased operational efficiency
- Accurate information in context of need
- Improved brand image
- Increased visibility improves supply chain performance
- Improved compliance with service level agreements
- Improved co-ordination across revenue channels
- Improved up sell-and cross-sell opportunities
- Reduced inventory stock-outs and improved product mix
- Compliance with legislation
Customer Data Integration requires a combination of technologies and processes to manage the integration of data within customer information systems to deliver data which is fit for business.
DQ Global’s New DQ Studio™ application enables businesses to orchestrate their ad-hoc and repeatable data migration and data integration projects, whilst ensuring customer data quality improvement is always part of the process.
