A major multinational electronics and retail firm sought to link inconsistent and isolated customer records across its numerous divisions to eliminate redundant data entry and enable single-view, company-wide customer transaction histories.
Our Client’s Needs
Rapid growth from mergers, acquisitions, and organic expansion had led to disconnected and redundant customer data, as well as inconsistencies stemming from systems differences. The result was on-going duplicate data entry and fragmented, incomplete customer understanding. With no way to link customers’ various unit-specific records, the company was unable to capture their interaction history across all business units.
Our Solution
Our client’s corporate headquarters created an API for the purpose of assigning unique global customer identifiers. Any creation of a new customer record or edit to an existing customer record lacking a global identifier required a call to the API to have a numerical identifier assigned.
To enable the initiative, we created a system that performs an orchestrated search across all business units’ systems for each customer entry or update, and then returns a list of results that match the specified search criteria. If any of the matching results correspond with the customer in question, our system determines whether the corresponding record already has a global identifier, in the absence of which the system calls the API for a numerical identifier that it then pushes to all of the underlying systems. Some data changes trigger mandatory approval processes, which we also designed and documented, as well as the associated registration, notification, and administration procedures.
Business Impact
Due to the ability to search the various underlying systems and use previously-captured data, the company has experienced a data entry reduction of about sixty-five percent. The single, comprehensive customer record view has keyed a larger initiative to develop a richer, holistic view of their customers’ engagement in order to yield relevant analytics.
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