New Technology Briefing: Customer recognition systems: A prerequisite for effective CRM?

Abstract

Today it is common for most large enterprises, when contemplating a major enhancement of their CRM capability, to consider their requirements primarily in terms of software functionality, systems and data integration and change management. Raising standards of data quality, including for example the accuracy and currency of customer names and addresses, has typically been considered either unrelated to CRM or of secondary importance to the data integration element of CRM. This may now be beginning to change. In the USA, many organisations with the largest volumes of outbound direct mail and inbound call centre traffic are now beginning to adopt external systems for what are variously described as 'identity linking', 'customer recognition' and customer data integration ('CDI'). In addition to performing routine address matching, these systems match, standardise, verify and update name and address records against a centralised universal register of known names and addresses. The significance of such systems, it would appear from early implementations, goes far beyond improving data quality. Proponents -- vendors and users -- increasingly see these linking technologies as having a crucial impact on the design of the data management systems on which their CRM systems rely. This paper investigates the origins and significance of these new systems, explains how they differ from traditional 'merge-purge' and address management services, provides examples of how they may be changing traditional data management processes and considers how likely it is that their use will spread to countries other than the USA.