Throughout organisations it is common for customer information to exist in a number of disparate systems. Often these systems are specific to certain personnel and departments and as such creating a single view of a customer and their interactions within your company is extremely difficult.
Having no “single point of truth” view on customer records means it is often impossible to identify a customer across systems. Out of date, inaccurate or missing customer data in departmental systems means staff effort is duplicated across each department, with many performing manual updates to their own local system. Cross-departmental processes such as fraud detection and single customer matching & indexing can proof difficult.
What is a Customer Data Integration Hub and is it the Answer?
Industry Market Research firm Gartner Inc. defines Customer Data Integration(CDI) as "the combination of the technology, processes and services needed to create and maintain an accurate, timely and complete view of the customer across multiple channels, business lines and, enterprises, where there are multiple sources of customer data in multiple application systems and databases”.
One area where significant benefits can be realized is through greater integration between front line CRM applications and multiple back office line of business systems.
Integration such as this can provide seamless citizen/customer interaction enabling more calls to be resolved at the first point of contact. This can empower front line CRM/call center staff, freeing back office specialists to concentrate on their core business.
Furthermore, ensuring data quality and multiple system updates of changing demographic information can also deliver a rapid return on investment.
If a customer data hub is to be the central repository of critical customer information for other systems, it needs to have critical capabilities to synchronize reliable data back to source systems. In addition, such a CDI solution needs to support standards-based service-oriented architecture (SOA) so that its underlying data services may be used by future service-oriented applications. Typically, none of the hubs built by data tools offer these critical capabilities, foreshadowing their quick obsolescence.
The CIBER Solution
CIBER's Customer Data Hub ensures data is de-duplicated, authenticated and updated across numerous systems automatically. The CIBER Customer Data Hub enables you to uniquely identify a customer within your company across the disparate systems that exist within your organization. Our solution provides a central list of customers, fully integrated with back office systems.
In addition, as it utilizes the powerful features of BizTalk and SQL, no 3rd party product needs to be purchased. CIBER have already developed a number of connectors common to familiar back office systems, again ensuring investment levels are favorable compared to other methodologies in the market place.
CIBER's solution recognizes that system integration is vital to the achievement of a customer-centric organization. Within your company both sales and customer service staff need a “single view” of current customer data that is stored across a wide variety of enterprise and departmental applications, thus enabling them to review the current status of a customer and to allow new services to be created for them as quickly and efficiently as possible.
Our integration solution is based on two major components: an Integration Framework implementing enterprise service business architecture built on BizTalk Server 2006 R2, and a Data Hub built on SQL Server 2005.
Data Hub
The Data Hub is built on SQL Server 2005 and uses its fuzzy matching algorithms to manage the indexing and cross-referencing of business data across applications. The system allows specification of matching similarity and thresholds for each type of business record on a variety of attributes, facilitating the automated data matching.
Utilizing the latest fuzzy-matching technologies provided with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services, it allows for complex name matching utilizing additional information such as DOB and gender where appropriate. It also provides great functionality for address and fact matching.
Matching can be performed in real-time and batch mode, allowing the data hub to be used for data cleansing during initial data load into CRM and subsequently during operation. Matching strategies include look ups such as: exact match, de-duplication of each source system and cross system referencing.
A user interface is provided to enable manual matching of records where automated matching is not possible, with the system providing the user with a list of potential matching records so the user only has to select and confirm which records are the true matches.
If there is no match, indicating this is a totally new record, this can trigger the creation of new records in the back office applications.
Integration Framework
The Integration Framework implements an enterprise service bus architecture based on BizTalk Server 2006 R2. This framework would supplement the core functionality of BizTalk with the following functions:
- Definition and maintenance of the core data model specifications that define the format of the standard business messages that flow between applications.
- A user interface allowing technical staff to define which applications “subscribe” to messages concerning particular business data types.
- Validation of incoming messages against the core data model schemas.
- Itinerary determination for an incoming message based on its content.
- Handling of acknowledgments from back office applications, including on-the-fly creation of cross-references for newly created business records in back office applications.
- A standard workflow for handling messages that fail to be delivered due to connectivity or other errors. This could for example alert IT staff when an application interface is offline.
- Archiving of messages as required for auditing purposes.
- A standard architecture for “inbox” and “outbox” system interfaces, enabling new interfaces to back office applications to be developed as efficiently and rapidly as possible.
What our Solution Can do for You
The Integration Framework and Data Hub work closely together to deliver the following functionality:
- A flexible enterprise workflow system to co-ordinate the creation and updating of business data in different applications, including CRM. The architecture implements an “enterprise service bus” which allows an application to subscribe to new or updated instances of a business entity type, and to submit new or updated business entity instances to the business.
- A cross-referencing system to enable records relating to the same customer in different back office applications to be related together. This will enable the routing of changes to customer data to and from CRM and back office systems in a consistent manner, ensuring enterprise wide data integrity.
- Recognizing and removing duplicate records, both on the initial load into CRM and subsequently as new records are added to the system. A powerful fuzzy matching solution is used to handle spelling variants and inconsistencies in data structure (e.g. addresses) in different back office applications.
- “Inbox” system interfaces for each application allowing business entities to be created or queried in the application.
- “Outbox” system interfaces for each application enabling it to submit new or updated business objects to the enterprise service bus, including de-batching to single records where necessary.
- An enterprise-wide core data model to simplify the mapping of business data to and from back office applications. Typically this model would include standard representations of customer personal and contact data (both for individuals and companies),locations/addresses and requests for services, as well as business domain-specific data such as policies and claims. The core data model also specifies the data-types and mandatory/optional status of each business attribute, allowing data to be collected and validated consistently across the organization.
- Document and correspondence viewing is handled by direct integration with the CRM user interface. Lists of documents associated with customers can be loaded from back office systems as part of secondary customer data upload.
The Benefits for Your Organization
- Customer centric approach with a single view of customers.
- Identify customers quickly by gaining a holistic view across systems.
- Improve service to customers.
- Improved productivity among employees.
- Efficiency and Cost savings delivered.
- Reduced investment levels as utilizes BizTalk & existing 3rd party system connectors.
Take the white paper (669KB)
Learn how Endsleigh Insurance is using Microsoft applications to gain competitive edge with their business.
Watch the video (46MB ) 
