While most organizations look to develop a single customer view to assist sales and marketing initiatives, there are other stakeholders that can benefit from customer data integration (“CDI”).
Using a Common ID generated from a customer data integration initiative, Marketing can match-up the accurate number of customers and prospects to an external marketing file. Then, a Market Penetration report can be produced indicating how many organizations are customers versus the total “suspect” pool in the external file. In addition to helping sales and marketing, there are other stakeholders who may be interested in this report for a variety of reasons. For example, executives could use this report to determine allocation of resources based on market opportunities, strategic acquisition targets that complement the current and potential market penetration, and communications regarding the organization’s outlook to investors, lenders, industry analysts, and other interested parties.
Another common concern that a single view of your customer can help resolve is how often there is communication to someone in a database. Many organizations want to send regular communications, such as a monthly newsletter, to their database. However, if a contact is represented multiple times in the database, then there is the risk of alienation by bombarding the contact with the same communication over and over again. Further, if the communication is by regular mail, then not only are you annoying the recipient, but you are wasting money. If the communication is something like a catalog with high printing and postage costs, the excessive mailings can really be expensive. Customer data integration can solve this issue by identifying the multiple representations of the same contact in one or more databases. Once identified, a data cleansing effort can begin if desired. Even before a cluster of duplicates is cleaned-up, a process can be put in place so that only one communication is sent per identified cluster of the same contact. For example, only send the communication to the contact record in the cluster that has the most recent creation date in the database.
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