Business
CRM: Examining Customer Data Flow
I have sent my information as a customer to several organizations. I have also been involved in handling customer information in a few organizations. Here, we will try to examine what happens to this information and how it flows through a typical organization.
A customer may initiate contact with an organization through one or more methods - phone, email, web form, paper form (e.g. feedback, event registration). Name and contact information is typical. This gets stored in a database and could go in several directions. Depending on the content of the data, they could go to a third party for pre-qualification, a sales rep, or their marketing team.
A pre-qualifier verifies the contact information, asks a few questions to find out their interest in a product or service, and then records these. They then send these back to the organization. They could then go to a sales rep or back to their marketing team.
The marketing team could use the customer information to send mails, e-mails, (if he opted in), invite them to events and one or more of their campaigns, to entice the customer to learn more about their products and services. The customer's information is again collected, and hopefully they have more information than they had before. This information can then be passed to a pre-qualifier again, a sales rep, kept for future use, or totally dismissed as "Not Interested". The last one is the end of the line, and the information goes nowhere in that particular organization. They may however, decide to pass it on to affiliates or other third parties.
A sales rep will call the customer, maybe try to set an appointment. They will talk, discuss needs, show the customer how their products or services answer those needs, and all this time taking notes and gathering more information. In the course of the conversation they will get information such as "key decision makers", "timeline to purchase", and for personal products, recent key life events. Regardless of whether selling to a company or to an individual, they will gather more information and write it down for the organization to use.
The customer is, at this stage, a prospect.
If the prospect does decide to purchase, his information is sent to the organization's back end processing, sometimes called order fulfillment, in life insurance companies, it is new business, or underwriting. At this point, the customer data goes through quality checks, like address validity and spelling. For company information, organizations turn to third parties like Dun and Bradstreet, who has large databases of company information like registered name, address, industry, subsidiaries, etc.
The prospect is now an existing customer.
Ideally, once a person or company is an existing customer, the organization has an "official" record of that customer. Some organizations actually keep a "master" database or Customer Information File, which is kept as clean as possible. Business units like Sales, Marketing, and After-Sales Support, get their data from this "master" database and ideally update their own.
If the organzation has Customer Support, they will be looking at this Customer Information File as well as a database that holds information about your purchase. They will also be logging all your support calls or requests. This entire activity is part of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Huge systems and processes are built around this business. The life insurance industry in the Philippines is a bit peculiar, in that the same agents do both sales and customer support, or what is sometimes termed as "Servicing".
Still part of CRM, Marketing may use your information, and the information of all customers, to do some analysis on purchase patterns, customer profiling, on which to base their future campaigns.
Sales may use the same information to immediately cross-sell or up-sell products and services based on what you have already bought.
Known Issues
The biggest issue in this process is data cleansing, especially in data collection. You have a form filled out, which may be mispelled, or entered incorrectly by a data encoder. Organizations either invest in data cleansing software, or employ data cleansers who go through all the data to check for duplicates or misspellings, or both.
Related to the above issue is the need for deduplication. If the "master" record does not flow back to the other business units, or if no data cleansing is done, different sales people may enter the same information for the same account and treat them as two different records. Many will not bother to check for existing records. This process needs to be partially automated or made less painful for the user.
Another issue is consolidation. Once a customer's information is received, each business unit will attach their own information to it. Many times, these information are stored in separate systems. Once the customer data gets into the "master" file, these systems do not always link their data into the "master" record. But to always have that "360 degree" view of the customer, that "link" is essential.
In the end, for effective Customer Relationship Management, Organizations must be able to record all information about a customer and link them to a single record, and keep the integrity of that record intact. The Customer Information File is a necessary initiative for this to happen.