No matter what industry or type of business, organisations know that understanding their customers is the key to success. Accurate customer information means organisations can provide excellent customer service by anticipating the needs of the customer.

 

However, achieving accurate customer records, and then maintaining that accuracy is a thorn in the side for most organisations - even down to getting the customer’s name right.

 

The Salvation Army, for example, has hundreds of thousands of people in its donor database and customers have a variety of ways in which they can provide information.

 

“Donors’ information is obtained when they make donations through phone calls, emails, our website, and mail,” says Larry Reed, Information Technology Manager for The Salvation Army’s southern territory.

This increases the potential for the customer data to be inconsistent. Perhaps John Smith writes his full name - John Robert Smith - on a paper form, but gives his name as J Smith on the website, and again as John Smith over the phone.

 

“This duplication of data means we could send “two or three mailings to the same person; … adding to (our) costs, and potentially alienating our donors.

 

“Duplication of data is one of the key issues in achieving a single customer view,” says Jeff Lim, CEO of software company Taten, which has developed technology to achieve this “holy grail” of customer service.  

 

“The key idea is that the information is not a static thing,” says Lim. But achieving a single customer view gets more complicated with more than one system within an organisation. When a customer corrects one record, which record is correct? Which record takes precedence?”

 

Typically, customer information across many systems is fragmented, rarely cross-checked, and potentially contradictory.

 

“The problem is there is no single system to manage these multiple systems, which have an array of IT people managing each individual system,” says Scott Stewart, the CIO of investment group Wilson HTM.

 

“Like many financial services, we’re diverse in the products and services we provide, such as broking, financial management, superannuation, and insurance.

 

“Typically, organisations try to create a data warehouse with one big database. This rarely works, as the database is too big and there are business rules for every system (which are hard to combine).”

 

Stewart says Taten’s solution which has been implemented at Wilson HTM gets the change before the transactions and then updates all the other systems.

 

“It has created a middle office, between the back end and front end systems - thereby managing diversity rather than consolidating it.”

 

Lim says that traditionally the idea of achieving a single view of the customer meant the end of a project, but in reality it is “just a snapshot in time”.

 

“A ‘single view’ is a living, breathing system. Technology is the start, but it’s also about the people and the processes and maintaining that single view.

 

“You need to train staff to maintain the processes otherwise it’s a constant catch up game. You can have thousands of records out-of-date because you forgot to maintain important links to the rest of the system.

 

“The key thing is it’s an ecosystem with interdependent parts, and you tackle the problem that way.”