ACHIEVING YOUR SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW

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1 ACHIEVING YOUR SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW STEPS TO PREPARING A SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW

2 Can you really help your customer? Your organisation s goal is to make the life of your customers easier. In order to best serve your customers you need to create a trustworthy view of their needs. This white paper will walk you through the steps for preparing a single customer view in as little as three months. Your Single Customer View - Start Today We have seen that automation in business is not only a blessing, but can also present challenges to both employees and customers. The rise of multichannel marketing now means that an integrated view of the interaction between your customer and your business is no longer self-evident, with simple changes in your customer s needs resulting in an excessive number of actions and communications within your business. This in turn results in a great deal of work and data handling, thus a high likelihood of human error and considerable inconvenience to the customer. The benefits of a Single Customer View are not confined to Sales and Marketing activities. It can also deliver value for: Compliance First Time Right data-entry Self Service Marketing Operational Excellence Up-selling and Cross-selling Decision Support Master Data Quality measures Basel II Privacy Fraud Prevention FSA Single Customer View requirements (2010) Sarbanes-Oxley Anti-Terrorism measures and Anti Money Laundering measures By providing your employees with the exact information they need to perform their roles, you can avoid service related problems, enable the generation of higher revenues through enhanced identification of cross and up-sell opportunities, and increase their overall job satisfaction. 2

3 A Single Customer View (often t e r m e d a d e g r e e o r Integrated Customer View) often i nvolves d a t a f r o m s e v e ra l systems. Customer data is stored in a CRM system, customer c o m p l a i n t s i n a c o m p l a i n t s database, payment history in finance software and order history in an ERP system. A CRM system is not a Single Customer View. Research by Gartner has shown that investing i n C R M s o f t w a r e i s n o t a guarantee that you will serve your customers better, even though that was the purpose of the investment. Over US $ 75 billion was spent on CRMrelated business applications, customer satisfaction has edged up only slightly., Michael Maoz, Research VP and Distinguished Analyst in Gartner Research. So, together with your employees and some help from the market, you will be able to realise a first version of an integrated customer view and benefit from its added value in just a few months. Fail to plan. Plan to Fail. The all important first step is to determine your goal. There are three factors in determining the priority: The financial value: how much does the organisation stand to gain? The time to value: meaning the time between the start of the activity and the stage at which you first benefit from Single Customer View. The strategic value: the measure in which the activity contributes to the long-term business goal. By adopting an incremental project plan (e.g.: department by department implementation), you can build up an effective single customer view that is valuable to the business as a whole. This way you can help your employees to support your customers more effectively whilst simultaneously improving the agility of your business. For example; a telemarketer s single customer view contains different information than that of a helpdesk agent. The best approach is to start with the department that is experiencing the greatest challenges. 3

4 Achieving a robust Single Customer View It is in people s nature to want to contribute to something that makes their life easier. The organisations task is to bring these people together and have the group set a specific and clearly defined set of goals. They must then have the means to achieve those goals. This consists of time, a project plan and tools with which to realise their single customer view. This process model is what Neopost Customer Information Management refer to as the 3x3x3 model 3 days to plan a workshop 3 weeks to develop a POC 3 months to deliver and implement Phase 1 of SCV In practice three days should allow an organisation to select the r i g h t p e o p l e, c o l l e c t i v e l y determine the first challenge and draw up a proposed solution. It may then require a period of three weeks to determine where the necessary information is located and how to acquire it. During this time a business case can be drawn up based on the challenge and the proposed solution. The last step for the result is actually implementing the first version of a Single Customer View and this could take anywhere between one and three months, provided the right people are involved and the executive sponsorship is in place. 4

5 Step 1: Determine your goal in three days Let s assume that the business has reached broad agreement on the business challenges for discussion in an initial workshop. Now we need to find out what information is needed to successfully overcome that challenge and allow your employees to do their job. To be able to give effective customer service to your existing customer your employees need to have all relevant and up-to-date information at hand. This sounds straight-forward, but isn t always the case because: Who has the relevant information and can it be accessed easily? What information is needed to provide effective customer service? Can the information be acquired and made available? Step 2: Determine feasibility in three weeks The aim of the last question above is to determine if the information required actually exists in the organisation and if so, can it be acquired economically and with minimal disruption to the business? Management experience has shown that by working together this step can be achieved within three weeks. Step 3: Your first single customer view in three months Having defined the initial project for realising a single customer view and understood the value to be gained from such a solution, it s time to get to work. The preparation work required has the following elements: Organise the basic customer data Maintaining the data by realising batch and real-time/point-of-entry integration with the main data sources, thus enabling your Single Customer View to be aligned with updates and changes in the underlying source systems. Make this data available through a hub (such as a portal) to facilitate the Single Customer View. Considering this, an organisation must continuously revisit its goals, the elements required to achieve it and the ongoing contribution by the project team. Neopost Customer Information 5

6 Organising the basic customer data To trust the data in your Single Customer View, you ll have to ensure the customer data is reliable enough to work with, Neopost Customer Information Management define reliable using our ACCU principle: Accurate: Ensure your data is up to date. Examples include addresses that no longer exist, companies that have gone out of business and people who have moved or passed away. Complete: Do you have all the contact elements necessary for your purpose? Depending on your goal, y o u m a y n e e d m o r e o r l e s s i n f o r m a t i o n. A n e x a m p l e i s determining a person s gender which can often be done automatically based on their first or last name. Correct: Is the data in your source systems correct? For example, properly structured and formatted postal codes, an address with symbol and content in the last-name field? Unique: Is every customer only listed once? Depending on your definition of customer (a household, individual, organisation) you should seek to merge related records. Making your data accurate, complete and correct usually involves two or three steps: 1. Cleanse your data file by using data quality software 2. Automated de-duplication and consolidation into a single customer record 3. A u t o m a t e d e n r i c h m e n t v i a external sources if required Cleansing: t h i s c a n b e d o n e automatically. Good data cleansing software incorporates knowledge of the structure of addresses, names, telephone numbers and other customer related information. The software also simulates human reasoning based on knowledge. When you see Mr. Julia Smiht, you know that it should be Ms. Julia Smith. These are the kinds of problems you want to remove from your customer data, preferably with as little effort as possible. Consolidation: Seeing as it is often simpler for your employees to add a customer, or even a file full of prospects a second time, instead of finding out whether someone is already registered, the number of duplicate customer entries at many organisations increases by 20% each year, additionally customer data can degrade in accuracy by up to 30% annually; thus making a single customer view impossible. For this you need an automated solution, which still requires that Smiht and Smith are put together. 6

7 Enriching: A great deal of information can be purchased in the UK, and you may be required to perform certain validation tasks. For instance, you may have to check a telephone number is listed on the Telephone Preference Service. By using a process similar to your data consolidation task, you can link the purchased information to what you already have and automatically enrich that data. The purchased information can vary from Credit Scoring information, telephone numbers, postcodes, etc. Maintaining the data: integration with source systems This part of the preparation of your Single Customer View solution can be as extensive and involved as you need it to be. The objective of this is to satisfy the needs of your customers. This step will require the business to consider the following issues: Do we want changed data to be automatically sent to the source systems? The advantage of this is that your customer data in multiple systems is properly maintained, but it may require some investment depending on the interoperability of the source systems. everything or make decisions based on how users will access the data. Should employees have a complete and up-to-date view of their customer immediately, or is a maximum delay of 24 hours permissible? In other words do we process everything in real-time or can certain information be processed overnight? As long as the project remains focused on the initial objective and the intended result is deemed to provide essential value to the business you have many options. The Neopost Customer Information Management approach to Single Customer View is achieved through incremental project deliverables. Making the data available in a central location The previous steps are all about the preparation. Whether you chose to make your CRM solution the central part of the system or establish a Customer Data Hub, it must serve the needs of your customers and your employees. Make sure that the data is a complete set of information on your customers, available anytime, anywhere. Do we want to make the Single Customer View available locally, or across the enterprise via a SaaS option, or inclusion on mobile devices? The choice here is to either pay for 7

8 About Human Inference, by Neopost Human Inference, acquired by Neopost in 2012, has been helping governments and businesses to improve their customer relationships for over 25 years, by resolving all their customer data and information quality concerns. This means that: the Belastingdienst [Dutch Tax and Customs Administration] can enter your correct information in advance Center Parcs c a n s e n d y o u a personalized offer, resulting in a 20% higher return on their marketing efforts ING was able to merge seamlessly with Postbank Nutricia realised the basis for even more successful marketing campaigns in just three months A n d Aegon, ING Lease, SNS Property Finance and many others prevent millions of euros in fraud every quarter More information If you would like to find out more about the value of a single customer view for your organisation, or you are looking for tips and advice, please feel free to contact Neopost Customer Information Management: T: +44 (0) E: UKCIM.sales@neopost.com You can also learn more about our solutions and customer success stories by visiting us online: W: cim.neopost.co.uk Copyright Human Inference, 2013 All rights reserved. This whitepaper has been wrihen with the greatest care. However, Human Inference cannot be held responsible for any consequences in case (a part of the) content is incomplete or incorrect. 8

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