Solutions > Customer Data Integration 

As a business intelligence firm, we focus on data.

And we know that as a company competing in today's world, you need customer data most of all. We help you get it with customer data integration.

We're hard pressed, and so are our clients, to think of a single business initiative that better customer data wouldn't improve, either directly or indirecty. The perpetual quest to sustain profitability has always required more or higher value customers (or both), which in turn has always required knowing customers better.

But the challenge of knowing your customers today is greater than the capabilities of the databases you're using in the attempt. Enormous volumes of unstructured customer data is strewn across the Internet, while customer databases contain only structured data like purchasing, payment, and support transactions (even when combined with demographics from third parties). Customer data is spread across a variety of channels and touchpoints, while customer databases are often departmental and siloed. Customer feedback has swelled, and customer databases strain to capture and standardize it.

Customer data integration (CDI) efforts to address these problems aren't keeping up, either. These solutions are themselves often departmental and siloed because of ownership issues; or they're tactical and reactionary rather than strategic and planned; or they're dependent on legacy systems without the benefits of modern service-oriented architecture.

If any of this sounds like your organization's situation, Clarity offers an end-to-end CDI solution that can help. We combine elements from a variety of our services, and apply a deep customer focus, to do the following:

Achieve a baseline of data quality, and initiate a program to keep it that way.
Precisely because customer data is so dynamic, it suffers from quality issues more often than other data types. Without data quality, your CDI solution is doomed to fail before it even starts.

Build a customer data model, and a metadata model.
You have customer data from your various databases. Plus you have a rich assortment of other customer data in contact management systems, call logs, service records, emails, online technical support communities, and social networks. Clarity helps you identify, catalog, and define all these data elements and the relationships among them. We also provide objective counsel on building a custom model versus customizing a vendor model. Many CDI solutions die on the vine because an organization cannot agree on the customer data model--we get you safely past that pitfall.

Prepare for analytics
One of the transformative activities that CDI enables is advanced analytics. In the customer domain, this includes profitability analysis, churn analysis, and segmentation. These require more than flat, tabular data elements. They require aggregated, mutlidimensional, experiential, time series data. Clarity's team of modelers and statisticians builds your customer data model accordingly, and lays the foundation for your insight and agility, not just for marketing outreach programs that find the right addresses.

Launch change management.
The impacts of a common, newly comprehensive data model will be felt throughout your organization. We faciliate user adoption of CDI by building annotations and change management activities into the model, and by running change management activities as a work stream parallel with CDI solution development.

Consolidate.
Most organizations report that they have more than one CDI solution running or in the works. Clarity evaluates them and consolidates them into a single, enterprise-level CDI system.

Or not. Sometimes, especially in multinational companies with customer bases that are sharply geographically defined, keeping multiple CDI solutions still makes sense. In this case, Clarity ensures that they are interoperable.

Upgrade.
In environments where current CDI systems are primarily legacy ones, we upgrade or replace them as necessary. Modern CDI demands modern architecture, along with the scalability to handle massive data volumes. Attempting to ready legacy systems for these demands is often a high-effort, low-reward proposition. 

Integrate.
Clarity plans, designs, and develops the data integration and data virtualization processes that allow your CDI solution to access and use data from a variety of source systems in real time, and just as importantly, push this data back to operational systems. In this way, your CDI solution becomes a shared service that benefits business functions both upstream and downstream.

Bring in data governance.
CDI needs to be baked into your governance program so that data quality and spreadmart issues don't crop up, or so that you can stamp them out with a known plan of action if they do. But even more significantly, CDI needs support from the data governance organization as a top priority with executive endorsement. 

Transfer knowledge.

Education and training are critical components of any CDI solution's adoption and success. By design, CDI solutions reach more end users than almost any other system in your organization besides email. Everyone is either inputting data into the solution, using the data it produces, or both. Clarity structures knowledge transfer not as a tacked-on rollout activity, but as an iterative development activity throughout the SDLC.

For more information on Clarity's CDI solution and how it can add value to your organization, Contact us today.