Creating a Single Customer View: The Importance of Data Quality for CRM Summary: Effective CRM demands the creation of a single, complete, accurate view of customer information that includes purchasing history, product interest, and recent support interactions. Competitive companies leverage single, trusted views of customers to drive improvements in product positioning, customer service and support, customer retention and life-time value. In today s connected world, customer information degrades rapidly. Enterprises require a data quality solution able to profile and discover data anomalies and issues, correct and standardize all types of data, and maintain data accuracy and consistency in real time. Case studies demonstrate the capabilities of the Trillium Software System and how customers leverage a single data quality platform to attain measurable ROI.
Customer Data Challenges Many large enterprises have spent significant time and money building CRM systems, yet few have achieved the elusive single customer view they expected. The complexities of handling customer data from multiple sources are much harder to resolve than many companies anticipate. The process of pulling data from multiple source systems, defining and coordinating complex workflows, and managing roles and responsibilities across sales, marketing, and service organizations is challenging. To further complicate matters, as business needs evolve over time, all these activities must be coordinated with back-end systems to maintain information consistency and relevance. It is this need for coordination of information across lines of business, systems, and functional areas that can present barriers that impede the creation of an accurate, consolidated customer view. Some examples: Understanding the current state of your data: Source systems are often riddled with inaccurate and duplicate data. These problems become exponentially more difficult to resolve when data from multiple sources is consolidated and/or synchronized. Identifying customer relationships: Determining how consumers or corporate customers are related requires insight into which customers belong to the same household or to the same subsidiary or parent company. Managing transient data: Business today is online, instantaneous and connected. Customer, product and supplier information can change in a single transaction. Frequently changing data can degrade information accuracy, impact integration and present hurdles to defining up-to-date views across systems. Obtaining a 360 degree perspective: Creating a multidimensional, unified customer view requires the integration of more than customer profile data. It necessitates the inclusion of product purchases, call history, credit history, etc. from multiple lines of business within the organization. Implementing SOA processes: Companies want consistent business processes that connect departments and span applications in an effort to resolve disparate, uncoordinated activities and improve the customer experience. This requires disciplined governance at the enterprise level. Lack of collaboration between business and IT: Many CRM initiatives fail because IT and business users are challenged to communicate and work as a team. Poor communication is exacerbated when team members reside in different time-zones and countries. Managing multi-domain global data: Large businesses have customers that span the globe. To provide high quality service and support, their technology solutions must apply correct language and local standards to data. This demands context-sensitive tools that recognize the origin of data automatically and process mixed country-data dynamically. CDI: Customer data integration is playing a more pronounced role as companies come to understand that basic CRM alone cannot deliver the single view they desire due to the number of systems involved with real time updates. 2
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Single Customer Views A robust data quality solution plays a key role in building and maintaining up-to-date, integrated views of customers. It not only corrects and standardizes data as it is extracted from multiple sources, but it also consolidates multiple records pertaining to a single person and identifies consumer households and corporate relationships across records. Successful organizations have discovered that, for CRM to work, data quality is fundamental. Trusted views reveal your customers Competitive companies leverage single, trusted views of customers to drive improvements in product positioning, customer service and support, customer retention and life-time value. These companies target process improvements with precision using consistent, accurate, complete, and up-to-date views of core customer data and present this view to all business-critical applications and systems that rely on correct customer data. High-quality data drives success and secures competitive advantage In any enterprise, every business-critical application and core operational system must be populated with quality data. Success depends on it. Think about it. Every decision, every strategy, every key business process relies on high quality customer, product, financial and sales data. Better data in your operational systems means that better data drives your business. Data flows throughout the enterprise and impacts every process. High quality data lets you be nimble and competitive. But how can organizations improve data quality consistently and efficiently for so many types of data? Building single views of customers, suppliers, and products demands a data quality solution that can profile, cleanse, parse and standardize information across disparate data sources, applications, systems and platforms and across boundaries, regions, languages, and currencies. And users demand repeatable business processes and business rules that they can create once and deploy across the enterprise. Getting Ahead of the Curve The companies that are able to quickly and cost-effectively make the biggest leaps forward are the ones that place importance on the quality of the data, its value and its relevance. Data is inherently fickle. Frequently, it enters systems already in a state of ill-repair, with inconsistencies, missing and misfielded data. Even data that enters systems as accurate and consistent information is predisposed to degradation, becoming out of date and unreliable. Data updates, database modifications, new transactions and process changes must all ensure that customer data remains accurate and consistent in order to maintain the unified view that required so much effort to create in the first place. 3
Powerful technology delivers Total Data Quality The answer to improved customer data management is found in an enterprise-strength data quality solution that can handle and overcome these tough challenges. To ensure that data is accurate, complete, current, and consistent, organizations benefit from automated discovery and profiling, data quality correction and improvement, and governance of any type of data in real-time and batch environments. The Trillium Software System integrates with enterprise applications to provide a complete data quality solution a single platform that profiles and discovers data issues and anomalies, cleanses and monitors data quality operationally, and enhances the design and delivery of these enterprise solutions. No matter what the application CRM, ERP, or MDM the Trillium Software System helps you realize the value of your technology investments by improving the quality of the data that populates business-critical, operational applications and systems. Provide a window into your actual data: Only business users possess the expertise to make decisions about what data means within its business context, whether it is valid, and what is likely to be an anomaly. An effective data quality solution must therefore provide appropriate tools for business users to view and interact with the data. Cleanse source data: Cleansing data in real time, at the source, is the best strategy to prevent bad data from ever entering your CRM system, particularly when applied to the applications that feed CRM solutions. Parse, correct and standardize: Use automated rules-based processes to correct and standardize data. Interpret data, including product data and unstructured text data within its appropriate context both for format (syntax) and meaning (semantics) Correct misfielded and inconsistent data Supply missing values Standardize all values Correct data to conform to specific business rules Consolidate: Integrate data from disparate systems. Identify duplicates and redundancies Link corporate records from various business units, subsidiaries, and related companies Define households for consumers Create single best records that can be traced back to the original source 4
Enrich: Supplement consolidated records with additional customer information. Physical address changes Email addresses and phone numbers Preferred method of contact Demographic and lifestyle information Corporate profiles and background Mail and suppression preferences Regulatory compliance lists Monitor: Ensure high-quality, consistent, accurate and complete data. Monitor data compliance to company standards Set alerts to specific events/changes in source systems Track data quality trends over time Schedule data audits regularly Implement preventative data quality at the source and avoid errors and data decay in data warehouses, data marts, and customer data hubs Better CRM with the Trillium Software System Data quality is fundamental to successful CRM. It benefits many aspects of CRM, from initial implementation, advanced analytics, and enterprise-wide standards enforcement and customer data governance. Decreased integration risks: Statistics show that four out of five integration projects fail. The underestimation of data problems undermines project timelines and creates budget overruns. Powerful data quality software reduces these risks by enabling upfront, automated data profiling, discovery, and analysis and by automatically correcting and standardizing data during the integration process. Faster user adoption: Business and technical users alike trust high-quality data and are far more likely to adopt new systems and business processes rapidly when they know that the technology is proven and the data trustworthy. More revenue per customer: Improved information quality drives better knowledge of purchasing habits, preferences, history, and household relationships increases opportunities to upsell and cross-sell complementary products. Precise customer identity management: Compliance and privacy regulations demand more precise and reliable identification of customers. Apply the power of relationship management to ensure that parent/child associations are identified and preserved. 5
Improved customer service: Having accurate customer information, transaction history data and links to related information enables your organization to improve service and support and ultimately retain your customers. Fewer errors in operational systems: Reusable data quality processes can reduce the errors that pollute operational systems where 30% error rates are often the norm. Enterprise-wide enforcement of customer data standards: Organizations must establish standards for data governance in order for business processes that span multiple applications in a service-oriented architecture to work. Rapid information integration: Reusable rules and business standards for customer data streamline the integration of new information from acquisitions, mergers, and third-party sources to existing data stores. Realize the promise of CRM with better quality data Peak-condition data drives peak performance in all your enterprise applications. By integrating customer information from multiple touch points into one, accurate, current record, enterprises can rely on consistent segmentation to drive their treatment of customers and reveal the true purchasing behaviors and patterns that drive future sales forecasts. Impeccable data quality delivers the business value that lets you: Drive accurate analytics with high-quality data to promote reliable segmentation, target marketing, model scoring, and forecasting. Identify your most valuable customers, and direct sales and marketing efforts accordingly Balance customer interactions and communication using their preferred channels while serving them most economically Optimize customer interactions to maximize profitability Improve customer satisfaction by streamlining the customer experience and eliminating the errors and missteps that promote defection to competitors Manage householding and other complex customer relationships to ensure accurate personalization in all channels Determine true customer life-time value and drive lower value, marginally profitable customers to the most cost effective service channels 6
Case studies UMB Bank Profile: A financial services provider with $8B+ assets offering complete banking services to individual and commercial customers. Mission: Know customers, anticipate needs, advocate and advise, innovate and surprise Provide an unparalled customer experience. Challenge: Create a trusted, single customer view from multiple systems. Results: The Trillium Software System enabled the rapid deployment of a single customer view that presented all of a customer s selected UMB product offerings to enable customer service associates identify complementary products to cross-sell. Quote: Because we were able to cross-sell actively to the commercial accounts we knew had competitive credit cards, we were able to convert them to our card and garner a lift from 1% to 5% within a 12 month period. Solution: The Trillium Software System and the Trillium Software Data Quality Connector for Siebel UCM Porsche Profile: Luxury sports car manufacturer Challenge: Migrate Porsche s global implementation of CRM processes to SAP. Resolve issues relating to varied data formats and data quality across source systems, and append customer records with correct name and address information in the right language, for every country of Porsche operations around the world. Results: Porsche dealerships and subsidiaries can conduct global searches to view accurate and up-to-date customer information and can modify matching parameters for global data on-the-fly. The Trillium Software System validates, updates and qualifies customer data in batch and real-time, depending on Porsche s requirements, and delivers high availability and scalability by searching millions of records in less than a second. Solution: The Trillium Software System and the Trillium Software Data Quality Connector for SAP. 7
BT Group Profile: Leading provider of telecommunications, broadband, and internet services. Challenge: Eliminate archaic processes of Garbage in, garbage out! Ensure the quality of source data and deliver output that is accurate, complete, and able to yield a strong return on investment (ROI). BT needed a process to take tens of millions of customer records from multiple disparate sources, cleanse and standardize address formats, then accurately identify, group and link records common to one customer account, household or business. They then wanted to build and maintain customer data quality over time, encompassing both existing data offline and new data entered by call center operatives and others in real time. Results: The Trillium Software System is central to the success of our customer-focused business strategies. Without quality data, investments in customer service systems, Siebel CRM and others would be significantly undermined, said Nigel Turner, Manager of Information & Knowledge Management Consultancy, BT Exact. Accurate and complete customer histories enable improved services, sales and operational efficiency Automated alerts prompt customer service reps to confirm questionable customer information Correct data drove analytics for new product development and targeted launches to existing customers Customers no longer receive prospect mailings Estimated ROI to date: $1.3B USD Quotes: BT recognizes that there is a link between the quality and completeness of customer information and good account management, customer service, and effective operations. Customer data is a key business asset. We must manage it with strategic intent. The Trillium Software System is serving BT across tens of millions of customer records, benefiting hundreds of processes and is central to the effectiveness of BT s customer focused operations and competitive position. Nigel Turner, Manager of Information & Knowledge Management Consultancy, BT Exact. Solution: The Trillium Software System and the Trillium Software Data Quality Connector for Siebel 8
Monster Profile: The premier global online employment solution Challenge: Monster desired to meet a three-pronged challenge Meet triple digit growth goals by applying data quality to monster data volumes at all entry points into the business Aggressively pursue data quality improvements to eek out incremental revenue Balance the value equation to service customers most profitably Results: Monster uses the Trillium Software System for every transaction to standardize and enrich each record in real-time and check for matches (duplicates) across divisions. In this way, Monster collects information at each customer touch point and builds a trusted 360 customer view that lets them nimbly respond to market needs. Segmentation drives Monster s treatment of customers. They deliver a simple and positive customer experience by recommending the right product at the right time via the right (most cost-effective) channel and take pride in offering customers and new market segments additional services in a timely manner and responding innovatively to new needs. Quote: Exceptional data quality has been a linchpin of our growth to date. We re a $1B plus company. If continued focus on data quality can free salespeople s time and eek out a sales increase of 1%, that s $10M! We aggressively pursue any and all incremental process improvements that impact high data quality. Keith s perspective applies to other aspects of the business. If we can shave seconds or minutes from each sales telephone interaction, the money saved impacts the bottom line. Keith Landau, VP of CRM. Solution: TS Discovery, TS Quality, Trillium Software Oracle-Siebel Connector, Trillium Software Director. 9
Conclusion The Trillium Software System helps companies build a solid foundation for true customer data integration and CRM. Reusable business rules and processes help customers design, develop, deploy and maintain data standards for CRM and other business-critical enterprise applications, not just to meet today s business needs, but tomorrow s as well. Enterprises worldwide leverage Trillium Software solutions to achieve impeccable data quality. Using the Trillium Software System companies: Cleanse and correct data in real time as new information is entered into operational systems by the customer, POS devices, e-business applications, sales representatives and other sources. Manage millions of data elements including transactions, customer and product records, and supplier data across business-critical systems and applications. Integrate data quality into all major packaged applications and CRM solutions including SAP, Siebel, Oracle and more. Transact business globally and flexibly: Using a single data quality platform that processes global data according to local cultural, linguistic, postal, and electronic conventions and allows businesses to apply data quality knowledge capital, processes, and business rules to enterprise data at their own pace based on individual need. About Trillium Software Trillium Software, the global leader in both Enterprise and Operational Data Quality, provides integrated technologies and services that deliver global data profiling, cleansing, enhancement, linking, and governance for customer relationship management, master data management, enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, data warehouse, e-business, and other enterprise applications. Peak-condition data drives peak performance. 10
Offering global capabilities and global technology, the Trillium Software System is comprised of: TS Discovery: For automated data discovery and profiling TS Discovery provides a complete and accurate view of enterprise data assets uncovering the true content, structure, rules, relationships and quality of your data, revealing issues that otherwise might remain hidden. Data governance initiatives demand greater collaboration between data management and business users in the understanding and implementation of data quality; TS Discovery empowers users to design, validate and deploy custom business and data quality content rules quickly and efficiently. TS Quality: For parsing, standardizing, and cleansing global data TS Quality cleanses, matches and unifies data across multiple data sources and data domains including customer, product, supplier and financial. TS Quality delivers data parsing, standardization, cleansing and enrichment capabilities for multi-national enterprise-wide data and the ability to implement data quality processes in high-performance, real-time environments. Director: For deploying and managing real-time data quality processes A complete data quality application server, the Director delivers high-performance cleansing and matching services across multiple platforms, servers, and applications. Using the Director, organizations can integrate and deploy batch and real-time data quality projects in multiple environments. Unique ActiveEnterprise Resources functionality enables users to define, deploy and manage data quality processes in real-time environments, centrally through a single user interface. TS Insight: For scoring and tracking enterprise data quality A data quality dashboard, TS Insight provides visibility into the status of data quality enabling business and IT professionals, data stewards and analysts to monitor, manage and view trends of data quality metrics through intuitive scorecards, charts and graphs. Invaluable for data governance and business-led data quality implementations, TS Insight helps you measure the success of data quality initiatives. Usage Notice Permission to use this document is granted, provided that: (1) The copyright notice 2014 by Trillium Software, a Harte Hanks Company, appears in all copies, along with this permission notice. (2) Use of this document is only for informational and noncommercial or personal use and does not include copying or posting the document on any network computer or broadcasting the document through any medium. (3) The document is not modified from the original version. It is illegal to reproduce, distribute, or broadcast this document in any context without express written permission from Trillium Software. Use for any other purpose is expressly prohibited by law, and may result in severe civil and criminal penalties. Violators will be prosecuted to the maximum extent possible. Corporate Headquarters 300 Concord Road, Suite 200 Billerica, MA 01821 USA 978 436 8900 trlinfo@trilliumsoftware.com Europe, Middle East, Africa Theale Court 11-13 High Street Theale RG7 5AH UK +44 (0) 118 940 7600 trillium.uk@trilliumsoftware.com Central Europe Otto-Lilienthal-Straße 36 71034 Böblingen Germany +49 7031 714 756 Australia Office C401 521 Toorak Road Toorak VIC 3142 Australia +61 3 9826 3211