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 Integration Woes Plague CRM Campaigns That CRM holy grail-the unified customer view of the customer-continues to elude the majority of businesses. In ultra-competitive business environments, companies no longer have the luxury of launching marketing campaigns that blindly target mass numbers with little regard for personalized preferences. The same goes for customer service initiatives. It matters little whether the customer is a business or a consumer-they're increasingly demanding that the companies with whom they do business know who they are and what they like. This need to personalize is a primary driver behind the need to provide call centers with a unified view of the customers they serve. "Companies aren't trying to do everything with one campaign-they're moving to one-to-one marketing to personalize the experience," says Elizabeth Herrell, vice president at Cambridge, Mass.-based Giga Information Group. Customers expect the same kind of personalization when contacting a call center for a customer service issue. However, to date, the complexities of integrating disparate data sources with front-office applications means the holy grail of a unified view has eluded the vast majority of companies. Though call centers have been busy adding multifunction capabilities and multiple channels for customer contact, they've yet to successfully transform themselves into true multifunction contact centers, says Herrell. "People claim to have a multifunction contact center, but they have the components, and they're not integrated. That means there's no unified view of the customer," says Herrell. As has been the case with numerous large-scale integration efforts in the past, the complexities associated with defining a true integration strategy for front-office means that companies continued to integrate on a point-to-point basis, says Esteban Kolsky, senior research analyst with Stamford, Conn.-based Gartner Group. "Day-to-day pressures means many end up integrating point to point as needed rather than coming up with a true integration strategy," says Kolsky. "People are always looking for shortcuts. The problem is, upgrades and maintenance present a huge problem with this kind of approach." And, while companies are progressing from the operational to the analytical function that encompasses personalization, continues Kolsky, they often fail at the most crucial element-cleansing customer data. "Most companies don't want to take the time to do it right-because it can take months-but they underestimate the damage caused by dirty data," says Kolsky, adding that at least 30% of customer data today isn't accurate. And in a report released in 2001, Gartner stated that full three-fourths of companies involved in CRM initiatives haven't been able to combine a unified view of their customers with an actionable, personalized plan for customer service, marketing and sales groups. The upshot of an incorrectly personalized message is that rather than impressing a customer, companies end up angering them more than would a mass marketing campaign designed to target everyone. Though the industry is striving to deliver standards that ease integration woes through Web services and other initiatives, "there's a lot more talk than action," Kolsky says. As always, he says, success in CRM integration-and CRM initiatives overall-comes back to stable and effective business processes. "It doesn't matter what you do with technology or what you integrate if you ignore the processes you have in place, and those processes need to be about improving the profile of your customers," he says.
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