Customer Data Integration: How CDI Works

Customer Data Integration combines a broad set of components: data quality, matching, customer key management, process integration, and management. A reliable Customer Data Integration solution also offers expertise in extract, transform, and load (ETL); enterprise application integration (EAI); enterprise information integration (EII); web services, database management, meta-data management, and business rules engines.

This technology can be scaled to operate within the framework of the existing infrastructure of data warehousing and database marketing systems. It can also be grafted on to the current architecture and scaled accordingly. Customer Data Integration provides an architectural backbone to allow information to flow freely throughout the company to enhance CRM. The architecture of Customer Data Integration solutions is scalable, reliable, flexible, and, for the most part, affordable. With some Customer Data Integration systems, third-party software can be integrated.

The first step is Data Diagnostics, which provides a picture of the quality of customer data. (A diagnosis will specify if the data needs cleaning.) Data Quality refers to the quality of mission-critical data that a business uses to make its marketing and customer relationship decisions.

This could mean that a business has, among other problems, a Data Completeness issue: the percentage of all the data sources a company has integrated into a whole to support its decision-making. If there is data about customers in 12 different databases, then all of those sources should be integrated into the CRM system.

Data Accuracy is a vexing issue. It is one thing to identify and integrate all data, but how accurate and reliable is it? Grouping Accuracy is a related problem. Customers are grouped multiple times and a company must insure that these groupings by customer name are accurate, among other criteria.

Data Access refers to the speed in which a company integrates customer information into its Customer Data Integration system.

"Linking Technology"

However problematic a solution Customer Data Integration has been in the past, hampering many CRM strategies, "linking technology" (the function that links, matches and groups data by name or other keyed in commands) has improved Customer Data Integration by a quantum leap. In fact, today, linking technology is the most important component in Customer Data Integration. It is responsible for improvements seen in Grouping Accuracy. Linking technology is also responsible for the invaluable improvement in CRM that enables integrated customer data delivered to touch points instantly.

To employ linking technology a knowledge base must be built. A knowledge base stores the data used to build links for customers' names, for example.