This is key to arming your personnel with the information required to build and retain customer loyalty. The vast majority of companies today do not have an integrated IT infrastructure to identify, track, analyze, and leverage customer information. But ultimately, if companies are serious about CRM, such a system must be in place. Once a repository is in place, as well as a universal customer identifier, sophisticated analysis and modeling tools can be applied to the knowledge. These tools can be used to develop customer profiling and scoring techniques for customer assessment and to develop customer knowledge management techniques to better anticipate customer needs.
Several approaches exist.
These tools are callable from any application that captures customer information, and the Universal ID is returned to the calling system. The goal is to move from totally product-centered processes and measures to processes that put the customer and his experiences in the center every time you interact with your customers. For example, in the product-centered world, a customer support engineer, responsible for supporting personal computer users, would tell a printer customer to call another number because the problem is not a PC problem. In a more customer-aware world, that same engineer might be able to transfer the customer's call to the responsible support organization. The customer, however, would need to explain the problem again.