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
