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?
For most companies, I think account-centric views offer the ability to choose between tracking individuals and company or account-level views, as well as relationships. [CRM applications are available] that track information on both levels.
Hey Ginger -
Thanks for the recap of our conversation. And thanks, Elana, for your great addition to the thinking!
One thing that people mix up is the difference between the _identity_ of a party (there's only one *me* w/ my DNA, fingerprints, etc.) and their _relationship(s)_ with a company that defines me as a “customer,” a “vendor,” an “employee,” etc. As Elana pointed out, companies need to understand both.
To assume that I, as a consumer, am the same “customer” as I am in a purchasing role for a corporation is naïve. I am the same human being, yes. And that is somewhat interesting. But legally, I am not the same customer in these two roles. Most companies overlook this subtle, yet critical distinction. And I propose that it’s the relationships an entity has with a company that are the most important aspect of CDI. You certainly have to understand that Jon Smith, J Smith, and Jonathan Smith are likely the same individual to be able to unite their different identities as separate customers, vendors, partners, et. Marketing may say “yes, they’re the same customer,” where the billing department may well say “they’re different, because they’ve used different credit cards with different billing addresses and we can’t, by law, collapse them into one.” The division of the company who sold them a consumer product and the division who sold them a commercial product would see them as separate customers. So who’s right? They ALL are!
Which, in this real-life example, is the single version of the truth? Each department has their own definition of “uniqueness” and these need to peacefully coexist over the same set of data about the people and organizations with whom we do business.
Thanks again Ginger! This can be an emotional topic!
Marty Moseley
CTO, Initiate Systems Inc.
Hi Ginger
While the customer ultimately decides if they want to create/maintain separate identities in their dealings with the enterprise - having a holistic perspective is the ultimate objective -
only then can the enterprise truly come to understand that customer, develop relevant offers/programs and even anticipate needs. The net result is a more symbiotic relationship that can only strengthen over time.
How different departments view that customer is not germane. The issue of having multiple versions of "truth" - is a red herring pullback from troglodytes.
There is only one customer and one truth.
Cheers
Miro
Elana,
Great point. Thanks for the clarification.
You make some good points here, but I also think you are somewhat blurring the difference between what we've always called "operational" CRM and "analytic" CRM. You're right, a customer may want to keep two accounts separate and have their financial institution deal with them uniquely for each. However, if the financial institution is actually able to understand, internally, that this is really a single customer then the institution has a much better understanding of that customer, their relationship with the institution, their profitability, future value, etc. If the information is organized around the customer (i.e., the human in this consumer example) then that provides the institution with the most complete understanding of the customer as well as the flexibility to interact with that customer in line with the customer preferences or even within institutional silos (whatever the case may be;-)...