Coles says Allianz’s single customer view project has improved customer service levels and enhanced communications with its customers. Next it plans to use the software to promote brand loyalty and improve its options for cross-selling its products.
“In this day and age where customer service is paramount, we need to have a single customer view,” Coles says “When a customer contacts our service centre or needs to view their portfolio online, they can do so in one place. Ensuring accurate and consolidated client information is key to achieving this view.”
“We have now been able to improve customer service levels significantly; that was one of the main drivers,” Coles says. “Previously, we could have customers duplicated within our system. Harmony’s consolidation capability allows us to look at the customer database and eliminate multiple client identities where there should be one.”
Elusive Goal
Plenty of companies aspire to achieve a single customer view, but relatively few outside the banking industry have reached this goal. Gartner analyst John Radcliffe says while CEOs around the world are demanding the single customer view to enable their organisations’ customer-centric growth strategies, CIOs typically find the task rarely as simple as the directive.
“To successfully target, acquire, develop and retain customers, organisations rely on accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date customer information and insight,” Radcliffe writes. “However, the subject of the single view usually varies as widely as the customers. Companies may target a consumer, a business, a citizen, a taxpayer, a physician, a patient or even intermediaries, such as insurance agents. Adding to this complexity, creating the single customer view can be hindered by dozens of internal barriers. Internal politics, organisational ‘silos’, lacklustre executive sponsorship, mergers and acquisitions, data-quality problems, heterogeneity of operational IT systems, lack of closed loop integration between operational and analytic systems, and the inability to generate and leverage customer insight all contribute to project complexity.”
Radcliffe says while organisations can finally tackle the major technical barriers to the single customer view with a relatively new range of technology, processes and services which fit under the umbrella of customer data integration (CDI), the biggest obstacles — the political and organisational barriers — remain. Nonetheless he predicts creation of an accurate, timely and rich single view of the customer across channels and lines of business will be a key enabler for reducing costs, managing risk, and increasing revenue and profitability in customer-centric organisations throughout 2008.
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