Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

BENEFITS OF CDI INVESTMENT

A 2005 article on SearchCRM.com called “CRM’s ROI Answer” heralded a promising new vehicle for delivering return on investment (ROI) for CRM: CDI.¹ CRM projects, while increasingly successful at delivering operational efficiencies and customer retention, have largely failed to recoup their costs. According to Forrester Research, only 10 percent of business and IT executives surveyed strongly agreed that the expected CRM business results were met or exceeded.²

An integrated view of the customer has traditionally been an expensive proposition. Most CRM deployments focused on dashboards and reports, and never intended to deliver on-demand customer details with sufficient speed and accuracy. Some were nothing more than elegant databases with a portal on top.

Indeed, CDI has been embraced by many who, dissatisfied with their CRM outcome, consider it a necessary next step in CRM’s evolution, and one that can provide the tactics and operational features that can (finally!) be quantified to justify the investment. The market has moved on, and we find many clients and prospects looking toward CDI and master data management (MDM) as a way to leverage the data they deployed for their CRM efforts, as well as other strategic IT programs.

CDI requires a different means of value measurement than CRM. Moreover, unlike with many strategic IT projects, senior executives may not actually know or care about CDI. Therefore, the pitch looks very different.

Solving ...