How ECM helps create a 360 degree view of a customer

Author: Victor Bensusan, Vice President and Managing Partner

The Situation

For enterprises, the ability to retain their most valuable customers is sometimes more important even than their ability to attract and find new ones. Numerous studies have shown that, for companies, the cost of acquiring new customers can be magnitudes higher than the cost of retaining an existing one.

The enterprises which are most successful at building customer loyalty are those that not only meet customer needs and expectations but consistently anticipate requirements and exceed them. It is a competency that depends heavily on the ready availability of extensive information on all aspects of a customer relationship, from purchase and transaction histories to service and support issues.

Too often, paper-intensive processes that were designed for traditional brick-and-mortar business environments are wholly inadequate for true customer relationship management purposes these days. Increasingly, customers have begun interacting with businesses through various touch points including the Web and via mobile technologies and they expect consistent levels of support and service regardless of the interface.

The trend has put increasing pressure on companies to enable a sort of collective view of customer transactions and communications that is simply not supported by paper-intensive work-flow processes or CRM systems. For many companies, the consequences of this inefficiency have been troubling.

A report released in 2008 by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, showed that nearly one out of two companies are unable to fully monetize key account relationships because of a lack of adequate customer data.

The study of 450 CMOs showed that companies are increasingly struggling to attain a holistic and timely view of their customers because of siloed data, inadequate data-sharing policies and incompatible IT systems and databases. Not surprisingly, about 31 percent of those surveyed had customer attrition rates of 10 percent or more.

The Role ECM can play

The ability of Enterprise Content Management (ECM) systems to manage vast amounts of unstructured data makes the technology ideal for enabling a centralized view of customer data. ECM tools are designed to let enterprises collect, manage, view and share content generated at different locations in different formats and by different applications.

By using ECM tools, a company can create a common data repository for collecting customer data from multiple sources and applications. Many current generation ECM systems use Web technologies to enable different applications, such as CRM to then easily access and use this centralized data store.

ECM systems can therefore allow enterprises to more fully leverage their investments in Customer Relationship Management technologies. According to the CMO study, many companies currently are unable to take full advantage of their CRM tools because of inadequately integrated customer data. ECM systems address this deficiency by allowing companies to bring all of their customer data to one central location from where it can be more easily managed, analyzed and shared.