South African companies are in danger of being swamped by new sources of customer information generated by call centre and CTI technologies coupled with an increasing number of customer touch points, such as e-mail and Internet-based customer contact.
So says Andrew Connold, managing director of Synergy, the date warehousing specialist and Cognos-based business intelligence solutions integrator.
"Being able to analyse traditional financial and sales information just doesn't fit the bill when it comes to realising a successful customer relationship management strategy, but equally, it is no good being buried in customer data and being unable to do anything with it.
"South African companies have never had as much raw customer data at their fingertips as they do right now. But that data is only useful if it can be transformed into actionable business information," he says.
Companies have to be able to turn their customer data into meaningful information that impacts revenue, profitability and customer satisfaction. They need a coordinated understanding of the customer by being able to easily get a coordinated view and access to the information from multiple customer touchpoints - everything from call centres to order entry.
New sources of information include demographic data, customer profile scores, customer service records, campaign responses, multimedia data and Web registration/sales data. In addition, this information can be merged with data from providers that deliver lifestyle information to provide complete customer understanding. This merged customer data can then be correlated with data from the entire value chain for maximum impact.
Organisations need to analyse this customer information, isolate subsets of customer characteristics, and create profiles so they can focus marketing campaigns, attract new customers and retain the most profitable existing customers.
The Data Warehousing Institute in a survey earlier this year of more than 1 600 US companies found that the amount of customer data companies collect today is less than 100 000 records and consists of traditional account and sales information. But in 12 months, the survey also notes that more than half the respondents polled (53%) plan to collect between 100 000 and 50 million records.
The report, entitled Harnessing Customer Information for Strategic Advantage: Technical Challenges and Business Solutions, also sheds light on which products companies are using to implement CRM.
Based on answers supplied by 1 209 respondents, 22% of those surveyed said they were using analytical CRM applications from Cognos, compared with 21% for Oracle and 19% for Business Objects. In databases, Oracle is being used by 57% of survey respondents, which compares with 26% for Microsoft and 17% for IBM.
"Cognos has achieved market leadership because it brings affordable, high level functionality to business intelligence. It has the ability to turn raw customer data into real business insight by uniting all customer data assets from across the organisation and applying rich reporting and analysis to deliver an in-depth, enterprise view of every customer relationship," concludes Connold.
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Synergy, a 24-year-old business intelligence software solution company, is headquartered in Johannesburg with branches in Cape Town and Durban, is owned by Dale Investments and JLP Properties, two privately held investment companies, with a significant portion of shares being held by staff.
The board is chaired by Robert Engels, a former Executive Vice President of Cognos, who during his 14 years with Cognos saw the company's European operations grow from about 35 people to nearly 500. Synergy Computing's Managing Director, Andrew Connold, the former MD of Plessey Cellular and Deputy Chairman, Dr John Temple, the former CEO of Plessey SA, have both built multiple businesses in SA.
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