How many times have you received a call on your mobile phone from a leading bank wanting to sell you a credit card, while you already own another credit card issued by that bank? Or from your insurance company? Isn’t it frustrating or sometimes even funny that while you are holding someone’s right hand daily, their left hand doesn’t even seem to know you!
Now imagine this, you live in New York and have gone for a business trip to DC. You call your favorite pizza chain to order and they greet you with your first name and ask if you would like to order your regular! How great would it feel if this happens every time?
What can make this difference, you must be thinking. Invest your IT budget into something that provides a faster ROI – Customer Data Integration (CDI) is the answer!
Identifying the need
In a world where your customers are in millions and data collection sources endless, it matters to have a single customer view in place!
Today your customer is increasingly becoming more versatile and mobile. And newer customer touch-points are coming into existence everyday – company websites, e-mail, live chat, mobile phones, social media, wireless technology and more! This in turn, means more scattered and inconsistent data everywhere (data silos). What’s more, the expected level of response time from you is getting smaller and expected level of service is climbing higher. Hence, the need to have a consistent view of each and every customer available across every touch-point is greater now than ever before!
What is Customer Data Integration (CDI)?
Gartner defines CDI as ‘The combination of technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of the customer across multiple channels, business lines, and potentially enterprises, where there are multiple sources of customer data in multiple application systems and databases.’
If you are a bank, and an existing customer with a savings account in your bank wants to take a credit card – you should not ask him for his basic details or any other pre-provided information again. Further, to improve your own risk management, your personal loan department should be updated with the credit card dues and payment pattern of existing customers. A successful CDI implementation will provide the Single View of Truth across all Lines of Business of your organization.
It will also enable enhanced and consistent customer experience across all interaction platforms. Whether your customer uses online banking, phone banking, ATM, or walks into a branch – all his information and interactions will be updated and available across all the touch points. This is CDI.
Benefits to expect from CDI
Happy and satisfied customers – When you have an enhanced view of every customer and his account, you know exactly what he wants. Hence you service him better and create improved customer experience.
Higher customer retention and reduced marketing costs – When your end consumers are satisfied, they are bound to stay with you longer. This increases your Customer’s Lifetime Value (CLV). Better quality customer data also means more effective marketing campaigns and reduced spend on new customer acquisition for you.
Enables better R&D for improved product ideas– CDI helps you really understand who your customers are and what their needs and tastes are. It can actually allow you to aggregate information from various interaction channels, and design better product and service offerings.
The Path
To adopt CDI, the most basic change that you first need to make is in your business philosophy. You need to transform from being a product centric business to a customer centric organization. Only when you are completely dedicated and focused on creating an enhanced customer experience, can you even begin to understand and utilize the full worth of something like CDI.
Your customer shall truly experience the delight of seeing one, true, reliable face of your organization, only when, on the inside – all your business functions from marketing to sales, operations and support groups provide the same consistent and consolidated information, and all your lines of business have the single version of truth available to them. Use CDI to enable the single customer view – only then will you be able to put together all the pieces required to solve the customer puzzle.
-Research Optimus
