How a single view of customer data integration can lead to better service
Published: July 17, 2006
By Lauren Gibbons Paul
What midsize company would not want to profit from customer service? To make profitable service a reality, your people need access to a single view of the customer and develop customer data integration.
In Summary
| • | Many midsize businesses will be able to turn inbound customer contacts into a source of profit—provided they can supply a single customer view to customer service agents. |
| • | Getting to that holistic view of your customer requires a customer data integration effort as you pull information from several different sources. |
| • | Consider implementing a service-oriented architecture to serve as a platform for disparate applications and systems. |
Transforming the customer contact center into a profit center is a hot topic these days—and understandably so. Traditional call centers cost a lot to support—nearly US $5 per call with a live agent, according to Gartner Research. Unfortunately, few call centers return much in the way of hard dollars. Most companies would love to see that equation turn around. The idea is to make it easier for your customers to do business with you by offering additional items or services for purchase, where it makes sense.
Attempting to profit from customer service can be dangerous if done haphazardly, however. The business unit managers must figure out how to approach customers sensitively or risk alienating them.
As an IT manager, your job is to help your company work toward a single view of customer data (also sometimes called the "360-degree view of the customer"). This centralized repository of customer data includes but is not limited to contact information, customer number, sales and transaction history, service history, customer feedback and preferences. Customer service agents need to be able to see the customer's history and preferences at a glance to determine quickly if that person might be interested in another offer.
In an ideal world, that single customer view starts with a robust customer relationship management (CRM) system. For example, a large auditing firm with operations in South Africa hired Liquid Thought, a Microsoft partner in Cape Town, South Africa, to help it implement Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0.
"They needed to leverage the relationships they already have with customers," says Roger Strain, director of Liquid Thought. The new system shows not only customer records, but also relationships among customers, prospects and even competitors. It tracks information like the customer's organizational structure. All of this data is critical to selling to clients and prospects more intelligently, which is a sure path to profiting from customer service.
Chart your customer information strategy
 | The goal is to move toward all applications with customer data sharing a central data hub, and integrating through a single, consistent integration layer. |  | | Roger Strain
Liquid Thought | |
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Even at a midsize company, it is likely that customer data resides in many different locales, including employees' hard drives, on your company intranet, in your financial and customer information systems, and even in people's heads. Determining where the data resides means talking to people in sales, marketing, and operations to learn about their business processes.
Once you have the information in hand, create your strategy and plan your efforts toward customer data integration. Just having a holistic view of customer data does not in itself deliver value, says Elana Anderson, vice president and research director of marketing strategy and technology for Forrester Research in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
What your strategy needs
According to Anderson, your customer data integration strategy must include a strong governance model, a clear purpose, comprehensive information practices, and identification of ongoing metrics.
| • | Governance means building the right team to oversee the management and administration of customer data. This team should include the executive steering committee, a cross-functional team of individuals from all departments that touch customers, and a project team consisting of people who work with customer data every day. |
| • | Articulating the clear purpose for the 360-degree customer view means stating in precise terms the project's business objective, such as measuring business performance or segmenting the most profitable customers. |
| • | Your information "practices" should include the establishment of a customer data source of record, as well as links and interfaces among systems that contain the data. |
| • | Relevant customer information metrics include customer profitability, retention rates, products owned by customer, offer response rates and usage rates. |
Consider the value of a service-oriented architecture for your integration efforts
The problem is that companies usually have a variety of legacy applications that don't support easy Web service integration, says Strain. For instance, you might need to integrate your call center application with your CRM or sales software and your business systems, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP).
Web-based middleware technology such as Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006, which is based on Microsoft .NET, is less costly and time-consuming to use than enterprise application integration (EAI) efforts of old that required costly point-to-point integrations. A systems integration partner can help sketch out a service-oriented architecture, which involves creating reusable software modules that operate independently of the computing platforms on which they run, and which greatly ease the task of integrating disparate systems and applications.
"The goal is to move toward all applications with customer data sharing a central data hub, and integrating through a single, consistent integration layer," Strain says. "Web services is the ideal technology to support this architecture."
One advantage to using Microsoft Dynamics CRM 3.0 is that it has been designed from the ground up to support the Web services approach. Still, getting a holistic view of customer data is a difficult undertaking because all of the systems that contain that data are likely to follow different data conventions.
For example, your CRM system might use an eight-letter last name while the back-office system uses 10 characters. These discrepancies can lead to duplicate data or, worse, erroneous interactions with customers, says Joshua Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting in Berkeley, California. "In one system the customer's company might be listed as IBM and in another it's International Business Machines," he explains. "Without a lot of coaching, computers are not smart enough to understand this is the same entity."
Whether you use middleware, do an old-school EAI project or use an integrated software suite, achieving the single view of the customer will put your company in the position to profit from customer-initiated interactions.
"If there's no single view, there's no way to know what their past buying patterns have been and what they might need or want to buy in the future," Greenbaum says. "Once you understand why this person is your customer, you can figure out how to treat them."
Lauren Gibbons Paul, from Waban, Massachusetts, writes often on midsize business technology issues. Paul has 15 years of experience as a journalist, with previous staff positions at eWEEK and other business publications. She can be reached at Lauren.paul@comcast.net.
