A common challenge seems to be emerging for marketing and sales operations personnel in 2008.  That is the ongoing requirement for a “Single Customer View”.  Most business recognise the potential for cross-selling and up-selling their offerings to their customer base but do not have the data at their fingertips to execute such initiatives.

The CRM promise of a 360 degree view of your customer never really materialised and businesses continue to have at least two or three sources of customer data.  Their CRM system provides customer contact, interest and sales lead information, their ERP system contains the line items of every customer purchase and their support system contains information of warranty, support contracts and installed base. All useful elements of customer data if you want to target your customer for up-sell and cross-sell campaigns.
Just like the hype that surrounded Customer Relationship Management at the beginning of the decade we are starting to see similar claims for emerging enterprise scale software that promises to link all these systems together transparently, to provide a single customer view.  Of course this all comes at a price!

Our answer to this is to apply a pragmatic data-centric approach.  Rather than trying to tie these systems together using technology our approach is to take feeds from each source and combine into a single Master Reference database.  Whilst this approach is not real-time it can be performed monthly or even weekly which is usually sufficient for the marketer who is executing campaigns to a timetable anyway. With the clever use of mapping algorithms the refresh process can be made quick, efficient and cost effective and can even encompass third party data sources to clean and enhance the data further.

This Master database can then be used by the marketing department to segment and target their customer base in ways that were just not possible whilst the data remained separated in the source systems.

We have recent cases whereby the insight gained by the business by combining and analysing their customer data completely changed their tactical approach to customer communication.  Just think what it could do to your business?