Customer Data Integration: A Primer
Lyndsay Wise - August 22, 2006

Introduction

Implementing a customer data management system can be the difference between success and failure in terms of leveraging an organization's customer relationship management (CRM) system. Since customers drive profitability, organizations need a way to provide their employees with a single view of the customer and to provide that customer with above-average customer service. Unfortunately, this is not always the case. Disparate applications such as billing and call center systems do not always feed into one another, and even when they do, lack of data cleansing and management can cause employees to see only a portion of a customer's history, interactions, or profiles. A widely used example is that of an organization sending multiple marketing brochures to one customer because of inaccuracies and lack of customer data synchronization. A more alarming example is having more than one customer record for a specific customer, with the collections department calling that customer to collect on an account that is actually current...