During the Gartner Customer 360 Summit in San Diego in September, Gene Alvarez, managing VP of Gartner's CRM practise, shared some survey results in his presentation "Planning for the Customer Experience of 2020".
He explained that the biggest challenge customer initiatives in CRM will have to face, are multiple sets of customer data and information existing in disparate systems.
Does this come as a surprise? To me, this feels like the "same old song".....
For any CRM system in the world, the success of marketing, sales or services depends hugely on the quality of the customer data in that system. In addition, a CRM initiative must be embedded in a sound customer data management strategy. Gartner predicts that “Through 2017, CRM leaders who avoid MDM will derive erroneous results that annoy customers, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in potential revenue gains.”
So, if we look at these challenges, what kind of problems do actually occur in a day-to-day CRM practise?
In her white paper on smart CRM, Esther Labrie shows some figures to demonstrate the effect of customer data being quite volatile and error-prone:
In the UK alone, between 5 and 8% of the population change address each year, with an additional 400,000 addresses becoming invalid as a result of a resident’s death. A large number of the 265,000 marriages and 115,000 divorces occurring in the UK annually result in a name change on the part of one of the spouses. Meanwhile, thousands of street names, postcodes and names of cities and towns are changed or modified each year, with the majority of the changes relating to the address.
In addition there are the data entry errors and typos made by call centre agents or customers using self-service data management. This may include misspelled names, missing house numbers or incorrect phone numbers.
One can easily imagine the effects of bad data on business in a single system. As the number of systems with incomplete, incorrect or duplicate data increases, creating real customer experience with a single customer view becomes harder and harder.
Everyone who wants to reap the true value of customer data, must make sure that customer data initiatives are part of a strategic plan. Managing customer data is not a simple task; it requires effort, budget and commitment across the entire organisation.
Once again, check out the white paper....
He explained that the biggest challenge customer initiatives in CRM will have to face, are multiple sets of customer data and information existing in disparate systems.
Does this come as a surprise? To me, this feels like the "same old song".....
For any CRM system in the world, the success of marketing, sales or services depends hugely on the quality of the customer data in that system. In addition, a CRM initiative must be embedded in a sound customer data management strategy. Gartner predicts that “Through 2017, CRM leaders who avoid MDM will derive erroneous results that annoy customers, resulting in a 25 percent reduction in potential revenue gains.”
So, if we look at these challenges, what kind of problems do actually occur in a day-to-day CRM practise?
In her white paper on smart CRM, Esther Labrie shows some figures to demonstrate the effect of customer data being quite volatile and error-prone:
In the UK alone, between 5 and 8% of the population change address each year, with an additional 400,000 addresses becoming invalid as a result of a resident’s death. A large number of the 265,000 marriages and 115,000 divorces occurring in the UK annually result in a name change on the part of one of the spouses. Meanwhile, thousands of street names, postcodes and names of cities and towns are changed or modified each year, with the majority of the changes relating to the address.
In addition there are the data entry errors and typos made by call centre agents or customers using self-service data management. This may include misspelled names, missing house numbers or incorrect phone numbers.
One can easily imagine the effects of bad data on business in a single system. As the number of systems with incomplete, incorrect or duplicate data increases, creating real customer experience with a single customer view becomes harder and harder.
Everyone who wants to reap the true value of customer data, must make sure that customer data initiatives are part of a strategic plan. Managing customer data is not a simple task; it requires effort, budget and commitment across the entire organisation.
Once again, check out the white paper....