Managing Customer Relationships in Uncertain Times 4 of 13

Option 2: Use clean data to improve decision-making

Most business executives can recount at least one critical decision that they made based on bad or incomplete information. Data integration is only one critical step in improving the quality of business decisions. Data must also be clean, consistent, and complete. Companies often use data hygiene tools from companies like BusinessObjects to clean, correct, dedupe, and match customer records to create a master record that can be shared broadly in the company. There are many external data sources from national postal organizations, public data sources, and commercial data services to enhance this kind of record with firmographic or demographic information that puts customer data in context.

One key mistake that companies make in times like these is to view this task as a batch process. They clean and augment customer records once or on a yearly basis. This leads to countless challenges as the frequency of customer contacts (through the Web site, call center, and other outward bound channels) moves closer to real time. The quality of customer data must become a daily process to insure that analytical, dashboard, and reporting tools produce an accurate view of the business. When money is tight, how it is spent is even more important than usual.