Taming the Customer Data Beast

Your business is growing; more products & services are being sold to more customers at more locations and across more channels. Behind the scenes, your customer data challenge is growing too; customer data becomes scattered across departments, divisions and locations; your employees can’t access the right information at the right time; and few – if any – data standards exist.

“Let’s build a massive
customer data warehouse
to solve all of our problems,”
shouts your CIO.

On the surface, his approach sounds reasonable. A single centralized database sure would be nice; create a common data repository where anyone in the company could get the most up-t0-date and accurate customer information. By doing so, you could provide better customer service, improve retention, and up-sell or cross-sell more products.

Does it sound too good to be true? It just might be.

Beware The Tar Baby

Building a comprehensive customer data warehouse for any company can be a daunting task. Don’t make the same mistake as Br’er Rabbit in the classic children’s story of Br’er Rabbit and the Tar Baby. Underestimating the challenges of a customer data warehouse can be a real tar baby; once you stick your hands in it, it’s not easy to get out:

• The existing customer data will likely be in multiple formats that require significant cleansing and standardization.
• Different stakeholders will likely have unique data needs that will need to be reconciled.
• The number, type, and complexity of the customer data attributes that your employees would ‘really like to have’ will grow exponentially.
• Data warehouse solutions often require highly specialized technicians to design, build and maintain the monster on an ongoing basis.
• Your existing customer facing solutions likely won’t play well with a 3rd party data warehouse.
• Once you get the data into the data warehouse, it may be difficult to get it out in an easy, useful, or timely manner.

Despite the inevitable and oft-times obvious challenges with such an endeavor, many companies take on the tar baby and get stuck. Companies can spend a mountain of money to create their own holy grail of customer data. They buy expensive technology and hire highly specialized technicians to nurture and maintain it. The customer data warehouse takes on a life of its own and they lose sight of why they were building it in the first place.

Perhaps you turn to your CIO and ask,
“Now that we’ve built it,
what do we do with it?”

Taming the Beast

To effectively tame the customer data beast, companies must be able to develop and maintain an unrelenting focus on the customer experience. The ultimate customer experience is the ends while customer data is simply the means. Too often, companies can lose sight of the true goal when they’re in the midst of a building a comprehensive customer data warehouse.

To overcome this pitfall, companies should first develop a compelling customer experience strategy and define and optimize their end-to-end customer experience processes. By doing so, any customer data requirements will be framed by how they enable the customer experience strategy and process.

For example, you may all agree that you need to collect and maintain customer demographic information. But before you go through the effort of finding, dissecting, cleansing, migrating, and storing that information, make sure you know how, when and where that information will be utilized throughout your customer experience process.

In order to tame the customer data beast, you must use your customer experience strategy and process as your guide. Building the customer data warehouse without framing it around your customer experience process is a risky endeavor. Instead, your company’s customer experience process requirements should drive your customer data needs, not visa-versa.

Integration is the Key

Perhaps your company already has a customer data warehouse and you are looking for ways to use it more effectively. The key is data integration.

Since the early stages of the computer age, data has been king. Database management systems fetched top dollar and were in high demand. Remember the meteoric rise of Oracle, Sybase, and Informix in the 1990’s? Database administrators were also in high demand, and any individual with this highly specialized skill often fetched a top salary.

But the king has been dethroned.

Move over data, there is a new king and his name is integration. Having timely and accurate data continues to be very important. However, getting the right customer data in the right place and in the right context is how companies today are looking to make a difference:

Data is just data.
Data in context is information.
Information with relevance is knowledge.
And knowledge is power.

Today, companies must consider how to effectively share, move, and synchronize their customer data. Data quality and quantity are table stakes; the real differentiator is how you use it.

Realistically, you can’t have a conversation about customer care, customer service, or customer relationship management without talking about customer data. If you’re serious about becoming more customer centric, you will likely find yourself building a customer data warehouse (if you haven’t already). Before you begin, be aware of the complexities and make sure that you have a clear plan for using the data to effectively enable your end-to-end customer experience.