Successful enterprises make it their business to know their customers. This is essential to building loyalty, getting repeat sales and gaining a better understanding of what the target market really needs. Unfortunately, in most enterprises this is easier said than done. Most organizations maintain multiple overlapping and often conflicting stores of customer records and often don’t know what data they have, how good it is, where it is, or how to get to it. M&A exacerbates the problem.

The key to knowing and understanding customers is building an up-to-date, comprehensive view covering all touch points and interaction history, so the right users are assured of getting the right information on a customer at the right time. That requires a commitment by people to collaborate, the implementation of consistent data governance processes, and the deployment of technology that helps enterprises to consistently implement their best practices for managing customer data.

Executive summary
In a nutshell
Customer acquisition and retention is one of the pillars of success
The three ingredients of business success
Successful customer retention fuels customer acquisition
Enterprises making the most of their customer relationships
Closer customer relationships place a premium on good information
Most enterprises don’t trust their customer data
There is too much overlapping and conflicting data
Most trust their own customer data but no-one else’s
Mergers and acquisitions have exacerbated the problem
Unfamiliar customer data also an issue as companies partner
Timeliness and relevance remain major issues
Lack of trusted, timely customer data can jeopardize strategic business goals
The building blocks for trusting your customer data
Treat customer data as a shared, strategic resource
Managing data involves people, process and technology
People: line organizations must overcome cultural inertia and turf issues
Process: essential for setting the ground rules for managing customer data
Technology: key building blocks for implementing data integration processes
Vendor analysis
Informatica

List of Figures
Figure 1: The three pillars of successful business
Figure 2: Customer, product and asset data is widely distributed among different telco systems