Database Integration and Management Critical to Building Effective Customer Relationships

In their latest book, Enterprise One To One, authors Don Peppers and Martha Rogers build upon their original work, The One To One Future, and provide a scintillating view on the "why's" and "how's" of building a true 1:1 business organization. New advances in information technology provide a quantum leap in a company's ability to capture and analyze data in order to understand, evaluate and respond to customers more effectively. Concepts such as Customer Differentiation, Mass Customization and Learning Relationships are advanced as means of building "customer-facing" organizations that excel in acquiring, retaining and growing a base of business. A company's marketing strategy, or in fact, entire organizational structure, must be geared toward achieving a "feedback loop" whereby customers perceive they are known, remembered, listened to, and given the appropriate product or service. Building such an intimate relationship with customers not only makes them loyal, but it increases their lifetime value and profitability.

Is it any wonder that the call center community has been so quick to embrace the basic tenets of this marketing and management philosophy? After all, in what other industry is customer knowledge and responsiveness so important? Whether dealing with inbound, outbound or customer service management applications, call centers are critically linked (and performance evaluated) with their ability to recognize customer needs and deliver real-time solutions. And over multiple modalities. Interactivity, the fundamental enabler of the One-To-One stratagem, resides at the very heart of call center operations and continues to expand as advances in CTI technology create a host of new "touch points" from which to gather and deliver customer data.

Show Me The Data
Which raises a vital and often overlooked element of the customer relationship equation. Data. More specifically, the quality of data. Whether it is current, accurate, accessible, and integrated is of key importance in achieving a unified view of the customer. If the ultimate goal of an enterprise is to develop synergy with customers through interactive relationships, then it is necessary to build an enterprise view of that customer. Inherently, this requires creating an "infostructure" that integrates data from all lines of business and operational systems, enriches it with external data, and delivers this data to customer touch points.

The concept of Technology Enabled Relationship Marketing (TERM) has developed in response to the need of marketers to communicate interactively with customers and prospects. However, current providers of TERM-type solutions rely primarily on software applications that link legacy operational systems to the call center. Similarly, Customer Care applications are generally developed for a specific line of business using data which resides in that particular billing or customer service system. While both applications allow Customer Service Representatives to leverage information, the depth, breadth and precision of customer data will be greater when combined with sources throughout an organization.

In order to leverage fully the value of your information and develop meaningful customer relationships, companies must integrate marketing databases with teleservice, sales and operational systems. The marketing database contains consolidated historical records of billing, usage and service data across all lines of business and represents a strategic asset in meeting the challenges of real-time sales and service operations, as well as the downstream deployment of multi-phase marketing and customer relationship programs.

Bring It All Together
The successful integration of marketing databases with customer touch points depends on two key factors:
1. Data integration (See Chart) of disparate data sources
2. Creation of application specific data marts

Data Integration
The goal of data integration is to identify, validate and consolidate strategic data about your customers into a central repository to be accessed for decision support. As the front-end to building a marketing database or warehouse, data integration impacts the quality and integrity of your information resources to provide more targeted, intelligent and cost effective marketing. Elements of the data integration process include:

Data Knowledge and Awareness:
To gain a thorough understanding of source data, your analysis must include:

• Domain/Range Investigation: What is the definition of accurate data?
• Data Transformation Rules: Determine rules and conditions for converting business data to meet end-user needs.
• Frequency Analysis: How accurate is the data? What is the frequency of update?

Quality Assurance

• Conversion: Multi-sourced data files need to be edited and reformatted in a uniform manner. Sophisticated algorithms are used to standardize data by identifying the location, length and accuracy of each data field. The end result is a set of uniform data records with identifiable lines of customer address and associated names. Professional titles, gender codes or unique ID numbers can be added to each record for personalized responses at customer touch points.
• Standardization: All customer address information is verified and corrected to meet U.S. Postal Service deliverability standards. In addition to gathering precise delivery point data on home, business and SOHO accounts, Address Standardization results in better service at the customer touch point. As a common thread of information that links records across legacy systems, accurate address data is a vital cross-reference for the delivery of interactive customer reference, verification, sales and follow-up direct marketing programs.

Consolidation And Enhancement

• Sophisticated merge/purge software is a powerful tool for consolidating household and business data from various legacy systems and lines of business. By linking customer records with common data elements, typically name and address, information about a firm or individual from across the organization is combined to achieve a unified view of the customer's product and service history. External demographic and lifestyle data can be appended to enhance customer knowledge even further by supplying intelligence on a customer's age, finances, household, autos and numerous other profile characteristics.

Application Specific Data Marts
As a net result of the data integration process, a storehouse of information is formed to allow customized communications at every customer touch point. Yet the very size of integrated marketing databases, perhaps into the terabyte range, can limit the real-time delivery of data so critical in a call center environment. To resolve this issue, and to support the multitudinous needs of other touch points using customer and marketing data, Application Specific Data Marts are created.

Perhaps best viewed as a specialized extract of information derived from the marketing database, Application Specific Data Marts offer the benefit of delivering data that is precisely tailored to meet the unique requirements and objectives of that touch point. Obviously, data content and detail will vary with the business application. For example, a 1-800 order fulfillment center may only need access to customer name and address information, whereas a customer service center would require an expanded data set on transactions, contact history, credit status, etc. Other touch points, such as help desk, sales, e-mail or the Internet, can design a mix of customer data that meets their particular needs to ensure speedy response time and lower database overhead. And since data marts are interactive and dynamic, information gleaned from new customer contacts can be processed to update account records in the marketing database.

Put It To Use
The power and flexibility gained from this approach in leveraging data resources have already led to exciting innovations in the call center marketplace. Some of these include:

• Profile Routing: incoming callers are identified by Automatic Number Identification (ANI) codes, scored by potential value or service history, and automatically routed to an agent with the appropriate skills sets and product knowledge.
• Event Driven Offers: multiple customer contacts within a certain time frame trigger product offers based on RFM (recency, frequency, monetary value) codes stored in the database.
• Value Based Offers: demographic and historical billing records are utilized to classify customers for up-sell and cross-sell opportunities. Sales scripts can be customized according to a customer's product set and propensity to buy.
• Automated On-Line Fulfillment: reverse appending of ANI phone codes with customer name and address to allow Interactive Voice Response (IVR) verification of delivery points for catalogs and promotional responses.
• Fraud Detection: requires callers to verify phone number, address or other data stored in customer records to initiate activation of offer or service (e.g., credit card, cellular phone)
• Telemarketing Campaigns: point-and-click segmentation analysis of demographically enhanced customer databases to produce sophisticated profiles, name counts, contact histories and extract files for communication programs.

Conclusion
The interactive nature of call center operations presents a great challenge and opportunity for achieving one-to-one customer relationships. Transactional data from sales and service touch points across an organization create an abundance of information about the customer. However, too often, this data resides in discrete and possibly redundant systems segregated by line of business or product area. The data integration process is a means of linking data on an enterprise level to forge a single view of the customer. Once achieved, a company is positioned to identify, differentiate and respond to customers based on an understanding of individual needs and behavior.

The essence of 1:1 Marketing relies on the use of information technology to create customer knowledge as a means of building loyalty and lifetime value. The proper integration and deployment of database resources, therefore, is a fundamental step in achieving this goal.

Denton Mitchell joined Acxiom Corporation in 1989 and currently serves as manager of Telecom Business Development. He has over seven years experience in database marketing and business development within telecommunications.

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