Week 8: Customer Data Integration

Organizations fail to achieve ROI from the CRM investments as the organization have no faith on their customers and organization struggle to integrate new channels and point of interaction with marketing sales and service functions. The failure to create a consolidated view of the customer relationship affects basic project objectives, such as a real-time, closed-loop process bridging analytical,
operational and collaborative CRM functions. Data integration plays a vital role at the time of development of CRM system; many CRM systems fail due to inadequate data management and integration capabilities. To resolve the customer related issues organizations will adopt CDI (customer data integration) technologies to resolve data primacy and accuracy issues related to system record of customers.


Solving CRM data integration requires standardization and interoperability. There are many barriers to achieve success for CRM data integration that includes department-centric applications containing master data such as cross-functional information as individual units maintain separate customer lists for local business processing. Customer master files affect CRM implementation, delay in goal, traditional integration method which add more complexity as new organization requires some system change, interface modifications and data quality diagnostics. Some organizations might solve customer data quality issue by using enterprise architecture techniques and approaches. The organization facing such data integrity problems should adopt CDI (customer data integration) solutions to resolve the issue; earlier adoption of solution will help the organization to gain success in business.

The CDI market consists of processes and technologies for recognizing customer at any touchpoint. There are three categories within the CDI technology market:
1) Infrastructure platform packages
2) Third-party providers
3) Service bureaus and data brokers

CDI delivers the required infrastructure to consolidate and augment transactions into a single customer view. These solutions include foundational components to create a panoramic view of a customer to leverage across CRM functions. CDI also supports collaborative and operational CRM.

CDI helps the organization in synchronizing the data achieving closed-loop CRM processing by sharing customer intelligence across the three primary CRM domains that is analytical, collaborative and operational. Merging CDI solutions with downstream data warehousing helps the organization to integrate a closed-loop CRM business intelligence environment.

Thus to conclude a well-structured CDI strategy has a set of planning, implementation, and ongoing operational requirements that align with the overall CRM strategy.