The Foundation of Customer Information Management

The ability to quickly make the right decisions about your customers and your business is one of the greatest promises of Customer Relationship Management and Business Intelligence Applications. However this promise is completely dependent on the quality of the information that underpins these systems.

Customer Information Management is about creating & establishing the processes that support customer relationship management and business intelligence applications- it is about having the right information, in the right place, at the right time, on the right customer and in the right structure to make an informed decision. However this cannot be achieved without first cleansing, integrating and enriching your data with quality information.

There are several steps required to transform raw incoming data into the clean, integrated and enhanced data a business needs for effective customer information management. They are:

1. Parsing - the placement of the various data elements into the appropriate fields.

2. Auditing - essential for establishing a baseline. Once parsed, every field in every record needs to be audited for content. This essential but often overlooked step should identify records with no data, garbage data (punctuation sign and symbols) and inappropriate data (alpha characters in a field that should be all numeric, for instance).

Knowledge of relevant value ranges for each field (e.g. that post codes should always contain four digits) help the audit process, with the output allowing a business to identify:

• records with no problems  and records with critical failures such as no address or no company name
• internal information needing correction e.g. distorted company and personal names, missing or inappropriate revenue amounts.

3. Application of Address Standardisation - the purpose of this process is to end up with a version of the address that is most easily machine sorted and quickly delivered. However you must be careful not to assume that address maintenance is easy, correction and standardisation can be complex and it does take time:

• Address correction - ensuring that address element entries in the record fields are correct and sensible when related to other elements
• Standardisation - this process ensures that numerical and alphabetical strings are standardised for example, ST for street.

4. Matching - a process most companies consider synonymous with the merge & purge. This is a comparison between submitted records, either within the same file or between multiple files and the process results in one file per site or individual (duplicate records are dropped).

Just as best practice address maintenance requires the application of multiple processes, best practice matching requires a comparison of corrected, standardised and updated customer addresses with a global benchmark database of all businesses. D&B's WorldBase of more than 132million global businesses provides an excellent matching reference.

Using D&B's WorldBase file your business can score any suspect matches with a degree of likelihood that the match is appropriate and accurate.

The process must not stop here

Cleansed data will generate the greatest number of matches to any third party enhanced database however to obtain the utmost value from your records the process must not stop here. Consolidation and enhancement are the pieces that will complete the puzzle.

• Consolidation: The powerful D-U-N-S Number links corporate families to provide you with an unparalleled identification and tracking system for managing and optimising customer information.

•  Enhancement: Enhancement - once data is cleansed it can be supplemented with additional descriptive data, such as revenues and earnings, credit ratings, and biographical information. 

Appending the D-U-N-S Number can help ensure :

1.      Identification of a site as being a recognised business

2.      Positioning of the business in its proper place as part of a domestic or global corporate family

3.      Appending of appropriate firmographic data, such as primary line of business and secondary lines of business, sales volume, number of employees both at the site, and the number of employees in the corporate family, connectable telephone number, CEO, additional contact names, year started, etc.

4.      As appropriate and necessary:

• Website address and information specific to the website
• Credit and payment history and judgements

T hese data quality concepts provide a foundation to help your business develop a clear picture of the customer.  Due to the vast number of touch points that exist within every organisation, a well-designed and managed customer information system can significantly improve efficiency and effectiveness, ultimately having far reaching implications on your day-to-day operations and on the ultimate success of your business.

In today's competitive landscape competition for your customers is greater than ever and this means it is absolutely unforgivable to lose the connection with a customer because of bad information - having the right information, in the right place, at the right time, on the right customer and in the right structure to make an informed decision could not be more important.