by johnt
15. September 2011 11:28
Antony went down for the Cloudforce 2011 CRM Event this week. It would seem that you can do lots of clever things with your data to bring it all together and get a detailed single customer view. The sources of information is ever widening, the level of email activity is flat but the social networks are growing exponentially, therefore companies are desperate to extract as much information as they can to get a complete picture of their customers.
However the cri de coeur that went up from a number of attendees was that this was all very well but they had holes in their data, some would say ‘there’s enough to fill the Albert Hall’. The CRM technology is ahead of the real world, the ability of companies to manage the quality of their data is becoming more and more critical.
With consistent data cleansing these problems can be resolved, the data can be confirmed as accurate and the holes can be filled with telephone number appending and email appending. Data can also be validated as it comes into a company using web services to ensure the basic information is correct before any ancillary lifestyle data is added.
Only when data is monitored on a regular basis will a company be able to say it has a single customer view.