Mobile
phone retailer The Carphone Warehouse is aiming for a return on
investment within 12 months, after placing data integrity at the
heart of a customer relationship management
initiative.
The move reflects
the increasing focus on data quality among IT directors, who want
to avoid the pitfalls of previous CRM implementations, said Andy
Bitterer, vice-president at Meta Group.
“The typical large
investments for enterprise application initiatives, such as CRM or
ERP, regularly fail to yield the expected results for a lack of
attention to data quality issues and corresponding low user
adoption rates,” he said.
“Chief information
officers are, increasingly, recognising the importance of data
profiling and cleansing across the organisation and we expect the
market to grow to £270m over the next two to three years.”
The Carphone
Warehouse, which has 1,140 stores across Europe, is rolling out
Trillium CRM software and Discovery data profiling software, from
supplier Harte-Hanks, to improve efficiency and boost its marketing
campaigns.
The two
applications, which will be rolled out across the retailer’s
European operations over the next year, are designed to allow the
firm to improve its customer data management and to link into
back-end systems to provide a “single customer view”.
“We hold customer
data from various transactional systems and we want to understand
the data better - it was bad-to-medium before,” said Rob Kent, CRM
programme manager at The Carphone Warehouse. “The software will
improve the accuracy of our targeted marketing and give us a
clearer view of the customer.”
The Discovery
software will highlight data quality trouble spots in the
retailer’s Informatica database, such as information that might be
missing or incorrect, for example if a customer has moved house, he
said.
The Trillium
software will then standardise the customer records, and enrich the
data where possible, such as with geographical or third-party
information, providing a more rounded view of the customer.
“The software
enables us to launch CRM initiatives that will improve customer
service, intelligence on sales opportunities and stronger marketing
campaigns,” Kent said. “We expect to recoup total project costs in
around 12 months.”