Capturing customer intelligence (page 1 of 6)

True or False?

You have 234,987 customers. Your support desk logged 4,721 calls regarding one product in March. Many of your most profitable customers reside in a sales region handled by that new rep.

Think of how your strategy might change if you knew some simple, basic facts about your customers. If you could see customer activity—interactions with customer service, accounts payable, sales and marketing, and more—in its entirety. If you could know that what you were seeing was the latest, most accurate information—and if all this were available to you in near-real time, not days or weeks later.

True customer intelligence. It's an elusive goal, but it's becoming a reality for companies tired of the incomplete and slippery information that tries to pass as corporate truth.

For years, companies of all sizes in every industry have searched for ways to discover the truth about their customers. But more often than not, businesses face uncertainties about even simple truths—such as how many customers they really have and which ones are worth keeping. Something as simple as one person's calling himself Jim Smith, J. Smith, and James Smith on different forms can cloud the truth. And even if customers use the same name every time, they may exist as separate entities on multiple, unintegrated systems. This confusion hurts your bottom line, through added expenses, lost sales opportunities, receivables delays, and poor customer service.

But thanks to a new, open-standards-based technology called data hubs, business truth is at hand. Data hubs provide a single, central place to hold accurate data that stays up to date even in the rush of constantly changing business conditions. A big strength of hub technology is that companies can operate from one set of data—one version of the truth, as opposed to multiple replicated sources—and that data becomes integrated into the flow of all business transactions. "There's a mad rush for information, now that people see we can provide accurate data," says Angie Couron, manager of data stewardship for Network Appliance (NetApp), in Sunnyvale, California. "It's almost as if we're trying to hold the doors shut. We can't move quickly enough."

Commercial data hub technology is catching on. Initial estimates by Stamford, Connecticut-based technology research firm Gartner show that the market for customer data integration (CDI) hubs grew from about US$25 million in 2003 to US$65 million in 2004 and is set to grow to more than US$100 million in 2005. Gartner also predicts that the application integration and middleware market, which includes hubs, will almost double, from about US$4.6 billion in 2002 to US$8.8 billion in 2006.

Although data hub pioneers point to clear benefits, they also warn that hubs require careful planning and the ability to navigate some treacherous technical and cultural hurdles. But with senior-executive buy-in, IT prowess, and close collaboration with business users, data hubs can quickly become a valuable corporate asset.

Pain Points

Poor data quality is a common source of pain for most organizations, with 75 percent of respondents in some surveys admitting to data problems, according to John Radcliffe, vice president at Gartner. But many of these companies don't realize the extent of the problem. "Significant initiatives, such as customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI), are failing at high rates," he notes, adding that they often fail because the underlying data is of such poor quality.