Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

MANAGEMENT MANDATES CUSTOMER INTIMACY

Customer-focused business trends incite drastic and far-reaching business programs. Executives whose company strategies had previously been entrenched in research and development (R&D) and supply chains were suddenly putting the customer in the middle of every conversation. There were a lot of anecdotes about how far this went. For example, as part of his newfound customer-centricity, the CEO at one of our clients declared a new company-wide policy: if you’re in a meeting and within five minutes a customer isn’t mentioned, you’re free to leave the meeting.

Executives are transcending the tired edicts of the late 1990s (“The Customer is King!”) and advocating more tactical, measurable customer-focused programs in order to drive smarter marketing and higher revenues. The following list of customer-focused business trends represents the core set of initiatives that helped set the stage for many companies’ newfound customer-focused projects. Not coincidentally, they also prompted escalating requests among businesspeople for integrated customer data:

• Personalization. The emergence of one-to-one marketing combined with a new customer awareness in advertising and brand management circles sparked fresh attention around personalization, the tactic of customizing both written and online communications according to the attributes and behaviors of individual customers or customer groups. Personalization transcended the customized letterhead salutation, ...