Do You Know Jon Smith?
One panacea of CRM -- both the strategy and the technology -- is said to be the single view of the customer (though many companies are still working on achieving it...). No longer is there J Smith and Jon Smith and Jonathan Smith. They’re all one person, and you know all about the business he does with your company. The question I’ve come upon recently is, should you?
During my recent trips to the Gartner CRM Summit and the DMA07 Annual Conference I spoke with several vendor executives on this topic. We talked about technologies like master data management that help to present a 360 degree view of the customer. But more important, we discussed some of the issues this insight can trigger.
One issue is resolving conflicting information into one truth, Anurag Wadehra, vice president of marketing and product management for Siperian, told me. The challenge here is that there may not be one truth that works for everyone who touches the customer. It may be that there’s an address that is “the truth” for the billing department, but that there’s another address that is “the truth” for the shipping department. Creating a holistic customer view must take this into account.
“There’s really no single version of the truth,” Initiate CTO Marty Moseley said to me when we spoke at the Gartner event. “Identity is in the eye of the beholder.”
So another issue is, what determines uniqueness? Consider, for example, a customer who has several personal and business accounts and credit cards with one bank. How the customer is defined depends on who’s looking at her data, Moseley said. In other words, there may be multiple definitions of uniqueness for one customer.
The biggest issue is whether the customer even wants to be seen as a single entity. There are situations in which an individual customer actually prefers to be “multiple” customers. Let’s go back to our banking customer example. It may be that the customer wants no links between her personal and business accounts, and prefers that the bank see her as two separate customers. That same customer may also prefer not to link all her personal accounts; perhaps linking some and keeping others separate.
Other customers, however, may prefer to have their financial institution see the holistic view of all their accounts so they can gain “most valuable customer” status and the benefits that may come with that.
“Uniqueness is all about how a person chooses to have a relationship with an organization,” Moseley said. “Uniqueness is the first thing you need to know; then you can ask what the customer wants. Because if you don’t know, you can’t make smart decisions.”
What do you think? Is the “single version of the truth” in the eye of the beholder of customer data? Or should there be one version, period, that different constituents can refer to for the information they need?
And, what’s more, should companies be asking customers what they prefer when multiple accounts are involved?
