Customer Data Integration – Pie in the Sky?

Customer Data Integration (CDI) is reinvigorating the CRM market, with vendors, systems integrators and industry analysts clamouring to tell us about “the next big thing”.  But, at the heart of a CDI solution is a very familiar concept, a single customer view.
Oracle delights in telling us that “customer knowledge begins with a unified, reconciled source of high-quality customer data” and SAP offers us a “single view of the truth”, whilst Forrester tells us that, in the past, we have “done things backwards” - instead of deploying CRM systems, we should have been investing in the technology infrastructure to deliver a “360-degree view of the customer”.  Anybody in Marketing can be forgiven for emitting an audible groan when they hear these well worn phrases and concepts being represented as if they were something new.
The primary driver in nearly every customer integration project I have worked on over the years has been marketing.  Whether the deliverable was a data warehouse, a CRM system or an operational database, a key component has been the consolidation of records from different systems to provide improved customer intelligence (to be fair to Forrester, I have also seen a good number projects fail because the data aspects have been completely overlooked, or left until the last minute).  The critical objectives of any CDI project are the management and assimilation of customer data from across the enterprise and the secure sharing of that knowledge to support every interaction with the customer.

Whose Customer Is It Anyway?

The biggest challenge I have encountered in any CDI project is not the target application or the data, it’s been the corporate politics involved in the ownership of customers and customer data with line-of-business managers staking claim to customers who have purchased something from their product lines, regardless of whether they’ve bought other goods or services from another department. 
When faced with internal wrangling about who owns which customer, I like to turn things around and get people to consider the view the customer has of the organisation.  Does your customer expect to be treated inconsistently depending on which department they speak to, or how they choose to contact you?  Or is it right that they should anticipate being dealt with in a consistent manner, regardless of the channel used?  If it’s the latter, you have a need for an integrated and coherent view of your customers (and their past interactions with you) to be available at every point of contact.

Is a Single Customer View Enough?

Everybody talks about CDI as delivering a single customer view, but I question whether that’s what organisations really want.  The perception of what constitutes a customer can vary dramatically within an organisation and different standards are often applied when creating an “operational” view of the customer as opposed to one that is used solely for marketing purposes.
If you spend a little time with your sleeves rolled up, looking at customer data it’s easy to see why there can be confusion:

• Mr M & Mrs E Smith – is this a single customer, or two?
• Jason Hince t/a Hince Motor Repairs – same question, is this one customer or two?
• Mrs F Hardwick c/o Ferrier Jones – who and what is the customer here?
• John Lewis – is that a business customer or simply someone that shares the same name as the well known store?

Perhaps the most fraught area is deciding on how to resolve matches.  Most people would be satisfied that, having found two records with the same name, address and date of birth, they could be confident that they were for the same customer.  But put yourself in the place of a Building Society or other mutual organisation, where your customers are members entitled to money or shares if you demutualise; unless you have the forenames on both records (not just initials), can you be sure that they are not twins?  Would you run the risk of disenfranchising one of your members? 
In my experience, financial institutions of all types take a very cautious approach to the rules they use for matching customers.  When it comes to creating an operational customer view the level of rigour applied often goes far beyond that which would be required for marketing purposes alone.  Although prevalent in Financial Services, this situation is reflected to a degree in every industry and it creates a dilemma; if marketing departments are being asked to give up their own customer view in favour of one shared across the enterprise, are they going to be left with something that is not fit for purpose?

Demanding more from a CDI solution

Rather than talking about CDI as something that delivers a single customer view, I think we should demand more of it.  Yes, let’s integrate customer data from across the enterprise, but let’s also recognise that we need multiple customer views for different purposes.  Whilst the primary view used for customer service may require a very precise view to consolidate customer records, marketing needs a view that enables it to operate effectively and efficiently, avoiding issues such as duplicate mailings.  Beyond that, effective marketing also needs to be able to identify alternative views of customers that group individuals into households, business contacts into departments and organisations into corporate hierarchies.
Asking for more than more than one view of customers is not pooh-poohing the concept of Customer Data Integration.  My conjecture is that organisations already operate with the concept of different customer views for different purposes, but currently each of them is build in isolation.  By having multiple customer views supported through CDI we can ensure that, whilst those views are different, they are entirely consistent and coherent.  This requires technology that is both robust and flexible, enabling IT and business users from across the organisation to collaborate in the creation and exploitation of the vital asset that is customer data.

Steve Tuck is Chief Strategy Officer for Datanomic Ltd, specialists in solutions for enabling Master Data Management, Compliance, and Data Integration. Steve can be contacted at steve.tuck@datanomic.com or Tel: +44(0)1223 228400.

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