Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth

SLOUCHING TOWARD CUSTOMER FOCUS

Nothing has as much impact on a company’s operations as an executive who declares a new strategic direction. Such declarations were common in the early 2000s, when many CEOs proclaimed that their companies would henceforward become “customer focused.”

Of course, major strategy shifts invited analysis of how the company did business prior to its becoming customer focused. Many companies paid large consulting firms big bucks to help them migrate from a state of “customer aware” to the nirvana of being “customer intimate.” While the distinction itself was up for debate, what was clear was that executives had to reexamine how their firms were building products, managing business operations, and interacting with customers.

Mature companies understood that in order to reach customer-centricity, they needed to understand who their customers were. More to the point, they needed to engage in an ongoing dialog with customers and continue to track their interactions and responses. This in turn allowed businesspeople across the company to understand who their good customers were, what made them good customers, and how to motivate other customers to share some of those traits. They needed to understand customers’ various demographics, income levels, existing product mixes, tenure, and the tried-and-true “recency, frequency, and monetary” analysis ¹ that could all foretell purchase behaviors. In doing so, managers were finally heard admitting that no two ...