Thanks and welcome back to the CRM Products and Technology blog from Consona CRM. My name is Tim Hines and I am the author, moderator, and caretaker of this blog. In my last post, I wrote about what different CRM technologies are available in the marketplace and expressed my frustration that the CRM suite vendors haven't been interesting in providing a whole solution, thereby causing companies and users of CRM technologies a lot of pain. In this post, I am going to take it a little bit further and discuss a commonly debated topic: the customer master.

If you are not familiar with the term, the customer master is a big deal in deploying CRM. Basically, the customer master is which system in an organization holds the master record for a customer. For some companies this is the billing system, with others it's the CRM system and, unfortunately for many organizations, it's neither of these. Rather, it is spread out across the organization. So, in essence, there is no customer master. 

One of the goals of any CRM initiative and deployment should be to unify the customer record for both application (be it suite or specialty solution) and operational reuse. In today's very disparate SOA-oriented, cloud computing world, with legacy dinosaur systems, PCs, SharePoints, share drives (file systems), document management systems, and external systems environments, this is very difficult to accomplish. 

I would argue that there should be one master record that is tightly integrated in most cases across two systems, and that those systems are CRM and Financials. One of these systems is the core to the front office operations and one is the core for the back office. By providing a tight integration and interjecting some common-sense business processes for updating this data, organizations will be more able to then propagate a single customer record across the organization. If you have a mixture of specialty solutions that augment the core infrastructure, they need to be able to leverage that customer master, so that there is, in essence, one record.

Why does this matter? Because your customers think it matters. Last night I had the need to contact the manufacturer of a consumer device that I purchased because they sent me the wrong one. This is an RMA (return materials authorization) process that should be completely automated through self-service … but I digress. When I finally found the 1-800 number (buried deep in the web site) and contacted the company, I reached the typical first-level agent who couldn't help me do anything. He then transferred me to fulfillment where I connected with whom I gather was a warehouse supervisor who had none of my customer data. I had to repeat my issue to him, so that he could fill out the appropriate forms and get my RMA and replacement order processed. Now, both of the people I talked to were pleasant enough and, ultimately, they helped me solve my problem (my opinion of the purpose of customer service - this is another posting that I will address soon enough). But shouldn't both arms of the organization know about me and have this information so that I didn't have to waste an erroneous amount of time repeating myself? Now, it's not that big of a deal, but I do buy a lot of consumer devices (yes, I am a gadget guy), and this will probably play a part in my opinion to purchase from that company again.

Had their internal systems been deployed properly, they could extend a fully automated set of services and processes through the web. This is ultimately what I would have liked to have done, given that I am a Generation X-er. But, I bet if I were to talk to this company’s head of IT, he would say this is impossible based on the lack of solid internal foundation. 

Mistakes are going to happen in every organization. No person or system is perfect. I guess the bottom line is: Solve the customer master problem first, and then automate as much customer self-service as possible, so that the customer will better tolerate fewer mistakes.

Next time, I am going to dive into self-service, explore why this is completely undervalued, classify the different types of customer service, and demystify many promises made by what typical CRM vendors call self-service.

That's my take. What's yours? Email me at tim.hines@consona.com.