Mark Israel
Chief Architect
OneSource
mark_Israel@onesource.com
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How to Breathe New Life into CRM Through External Data Integration and Taxonomy
CRM solutions continue to be criticized for producing a less-than-anticipated return on investment. Some organizations are even poised to pull the plug on these popular projects, despite the significant investments made to develop them. Before taking the radical step of abandoning a CRM initiative, though, consider how much your CRM system helps your CRM users understand your customers' business environment. This is often the most-overlooked area of CRM design, but one that can positively affect ROI.
The first step in ensuring success of any CRM initiative is to closely examine the business data used within the system. These are the details that help to pinpoint qualified prospects, cross-sell more effectively and extend relationships across multiple buying groups more easily. Such current business information about your customer typically resides not in your CRM system but in external databases - such as SEC filings, press releases, news coverage, trade press articles,
industry reviews and analyst reports. In order to create a complete profile of customers and prospects, companies must be able to link their CRM systems with high-quality external business information.
The complexities of integrating disparate external sources into often-monolithic CRM systems, however, have limited practical implementations of this goal. Although external information can be added manually to a CRM system, this is simply too costly and delivers only a short-term solution to an ongoing problem. Many enterprises have developed custom-built interfaces to combine various data feeds into their CRM applications, but have struggled to maintain these links over time, especially when many external content sources are being accessed.
Web services and XML, and well-supported XML standards such as XBRL, provide a solution to this obstacle, allowing companies to integrate high-quality data directly into their CRM systems. There are many advantages to
this approach, including:
- Speed of Development and Update
With near-universal support from major CRM vendors, XML and Web services allow for rapid integration of external information into your CRM system. This makes it easy to present external data that is most relevant to an individual functional group or business operation, in context with internal data. Most importantly, integration can occur behind the scenes, with automatic updating of account profiles, financial models, credit scoring applications or any other form or document, reducing the risk of errors caused by manual data entry.
- Consistent Data Presentation
Incorporating external data within existing CRM applications ensures that data is displayed in a consistent and familiar format, thereby minimizing unproductive research, improving productivity and allowing end users to rely routinely on a single application with consistent field placement for critical pieces of data. Users can then
receive a richer display of relevant business information within the CRM application, including news stories, current financial data, industry trends, updated executive biographies and detailed corporate family information. The importance of consistent display extends beyond just applications, to custom reports, presentations and even individual forms. Automatic data integration makes it extremely easy to update regular reports, sales presentations, company profiles, risk analysis worksheets, financial comparisons and any other material.
- Information-Driven Triggering
Integrated data offers far more than just formatting advantages. Once external information is incorporated within enterprise applications, it can be used to trigger alerts that drive specific business actions. An alert can be as simple as notification of a recent corporate announcement, or as complex as an elaborate financial simulation that immediately integrates new financial results. Overall, alerts
ensure that users receive the information they need to do their jobs effectively. Additionally, since XML is device independent, information and alerts can appear on any platform, including a desktop PC, a wireless phone or a PDA.
The Business Information Taxonomy
While XML and Web services can play a critical role integrating external data into a CRM, the task of correctly matching external data with internal records usually requires a level of expertise and supporting tools not often found inside the corporation. This is leading many companies to seek comprehensive business information solutions that provide all of the tools and services to integrate internal and external data within CRM systems.
In choosing such a business information solution, you should carefully evaluate a number of factors, including the range and quality of information provided, the experience and expertise of the information vendor and, perhaps most importantly, the vendor's
business information taxonomy. Taxonomies provide the framework for classifying, organizing and integrating a wide range of critical business information, and ensuring that it gets associated with the correct business entity within your CRM. For example, a commercial bank would want to ensure that its relationship managers can access detailed financial data (available in the form of SEC filings) about each client directly through the bank's CRM system, in order to evaluate credit worthiness. If the SEC filings are not correctly associated with each client, the evaluations will obviously not be correct.
The challenge is that taxonomy solutions are generally limited to a single approach: highly-structured data (zip codes, SIC code, etc.) or unstructured text documents (news articles, press announcements, analyst reports, etc.). The unstructured taxonomies run deep on business and topic terms but don't perform well for tagging companies - the key entity to a customer-focused
application. The structured taxonomies are typically too narrow in focus and don't cover the universe of information required for customer-facing processes. When outsourcing data integration projects, look for solutions offering a classification system that efficiently organizes both structured and unstructured content.
Simply stated, you need to employ the highest level of market intelligence available if you want to get the maximum value from your CRM investment. By using Web services and XML, in conjunction with a trusted provider of business information, a company can seamlessly integrate internal and external data to provide complete snapshots of their customers, prospects and competitors, which in turn will create new opportunities and precisely target high-value prospects.
Mark Israel serves as Chief Architect and oversees all aspects of software design for OneSource, a leading provider of business information solutions. Israel has over 14 years
of experience as CTO, lead architect, and senior technologist. Prior to OneSource, he held the position of CTO at both Cozint Interactive and HealthGate Data Corp (HGAT).
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