Whatever your reasons for creating a customer contact database, it's critical that the data you store in it will allow you to communicate effectively with your customers. Who they are, where they live, what they've already bought from you, and what they might be persuaded to buy in the future. You need all of this information and more, and you need to be able to access it in the same place at the same time: when you're communicating with them.
You need a Single Customer View.
To create a consistent single view of your customers, you'll need to link everything you know about them back to a Master Data record. You might already have a way to uniquely identify each customer or prospect across all of your business systems, but if you don't then you'll need to create one.
The most common way to bring your customer data together is to match at name and address level. But there are problems with this approach.
In many organisations, it's all too common for multiple versions of customer names and addresses to exist in different systems or functional teams. So which one should you be using? Is there a single correct version? Or are they all valid?
You'll need to select one version of your customer's name and address to use to create a Master Data record, to bring all of the other information you hold about them together within your database. How do you go about this? And what do you then do with all of the other contact data you've collected for them? Do you purge it? Or are there occasions when you'll need to use it?
There are a number of approaches you might take to building a consistent view of your customer data. We explore some of the issues in this article for the NCC's Evaluation Centre:
http://www.evaluationcentre.com/document_management_content_management_bpm/home.go
If you'd like to discuss any of the points we make in this article, or if you have any general questions about your customer data management strategy, please contact us at enquiries@thorneycreekconsulting.co.uk
Monday, 22 August 2011
Wednesday, 27 July 2011
Thorneycreek helps you to Raise Your Game
Thorneycreek Consulting will be giving a series of presentations on planning as a business discipline as part of the Raise Your Game programme hosted by Antenna in Nottingham during September and October 2011. The presentations are aimed at start-ups, as well as existing SMEs looking to expand their capabilities and prepare for the next stage in their organisation's development.
In the first session we’ll be asking "Why Plan?" We'll look at the different aspects of an organisation's operation which warrant the creation of a plan, the sort of plans you should look to generate, and how often you should look to revise them. We'll also be talking about what data you'll need to capture before you can tell whether your plans are working, and how to react to that data once it begins to arrive in your organisation.
In the next session, we’ll be looking at different ways of analysing the data you're collecting, and using the results of that analysis to improve your existing business processes and build competitive advantage. We'll also be taking a look at how to plan for when things go wrong.
In the final session, we’ll be looking at planning for growth, and building on the success you’ve achieved from putting your plans into action. We’ll also be allowing attendees to workshop any specific problem areas they may have identified within their own organisations as a result of the previous sessions.
Sessions will be held on 12 and 26 September and 10 October at Antenna, Beck Street, Nottingham NG1 1EQ. Start time is 6.00 pm and the formal presentations will be finished by 7.00. Admittance is free.
For more details, contact ian.skidmore@thorneycreekconsulting.co.uk
Thursday, 13 January 2011
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