Customer Data

Integration: From
Data to Revenue
White Paper
Customer Data Integration:
From Data to Revenue
Summary
Intended for professionals in marketing, sales, finance,
information technology, and other functional areas, this
paper demonstrates how D&B can be a critical success
factor in Customer Data Integration (CDI) initiatives.
Read this paper to learn how to overcome the inherent
challenges of CDI and succeed in delivering commercial
insight and a single customer view to your organization.
The Challenge of Uncertainty
• Who are your best customers? How profitable are
they?
• What other products and services can you offer
them? What other parts of their corporate family
trees should you be targeting?
• Can you recognize your best customers, whether
they call your toll-free number, walk into your store,
or visit your Web site, and treat them accordingly?
• How can you target and reach more prospects like
your best customers more effectively?
• Are you at risk anywhere in your organization from
a credit or compliance point of view?
If your company is like most companies, finding data
isn’t the issue. You’ve got plenty of data.
Data Rich, Information Poor
Your issues center on bringing all of that data together
in a usable way, and then cleansing, standardizing, and
enriching it, so that you can interpret and make sense
of the information—turning it into actionable insight
that drives business results.
In a 2005 survey by The Data Warehousing Institute,
53% of the respondents said they’d suffered losses,
problems, or costs due to poor quality data.
2
If your company has fallen into the trap of being “data
rich but information poor,” you’re working at a distinct
disadvantage to your competitors who are investing in
becoming more customer-centric, with CDI hubs and
related capabilities to help them get there.
You’re being challenged to increase revenue with smaller
budgets—to do more with less. That’s not easy when
you are uncertain about the accuracy, completeness,
timeliness, and cross-database consistency of your
internal customer and contact information.
Further, your data is fragmented across internal systems
that don’t work together, preventing you from
confidently identifying sales and marketing
opportunities within and beyond your customer base.
You need to:
• Gain a single customer view to be able to quickly
identify and act on sales and marketing opportunities
• Have more insight into all customer relationships,
including home-based businesses, single-location
companies, and larger domestic and global enterprises
• Work more efficiently and identify missed oppor-
tunities by resolving unknown entities in your
databases
• Implement marketing and sales efforts much faster
than you’re currently able to, and improve business
agility relating to customer information across your
whole enterprise
The Single Customer View
With a single customer view, you can confidently deliver
the right product or service to the right prospect or
customer, maximizing revenue growth while achieving
operational efficiencies.
• Marketing can increase campaign response rates
and identify missed opportunities
• Sales and customer service can focus on maximizing
the value of each customer relationship and targeting
the prospects with the highest potential
• Finance can roll up and manage credit risk globally
at the corporate family tree level
• IT can reduce operating expenses and maximize
the ROI from enterprise and customer relationship
management systems
The key to a single customer view is reliable customer
information in a single repository where accurate
information can be consolidated from around the
enterprise, cleansed, enriched, and then maintained so
information remains current and actionable.
You can reach this goal by following these simple steps:
1. Cleanse and identify your customer and prospect
information to ensure that it is up-to-date,
accurate, and actionable
2. Enrich your information with additional third-
party information including non-obvious relation-
ships such as corporate family tree membership to
add insight and show previously hidden up-sell and
cross-sell opportunities
3. Manage your insight and establish a process to
synchronize it throughout your enterprise and keep
it current
Your customer information is now transformed into
commercial insight you can use to better understand
the behavior of your best customers and act on new
opportunities. Once current, it must be kept up-to-
date—even the best data begins to decay quickly.
These three simple steps enable you to uncover hidden
opportunities within your current customer base, help
you comply with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley
and the USA PATRIOT Act, and ensure that you are
maximizing your investments in customer-related
systems such as customer relationship management
and business intelligence.
Step 1: Cleanse and
Identify Your Data
“Enterprises have long struggled with creating,
maintaining, integrating, and leveraging enterprise
master data. Furthermore, poor master data
management gets in the way of successfully completing
CRM, ERP, SCM, and other enterprise application projects
or results in an inability to achieve promised returns
on investment.” (Forrester Research, March 2006)
By cleansing and de-duplicating your prospect
and customer records before even going live on
your new CRM system, you can increase the
confidence of business owners, IT resources, and
users. Data errors can be virtually eliminated,
and end users can be productive on the new
CRM system from day one.
To avoid joining that crowd, look for these main elements
within your customer database:
• Accuracy: Is your information correct? Are you
capturing the same data consistently on your
customers across multiple systems?
• Relevancy: Is the captured information housed in
the right place?
• Completeness: Do you have all of the necessary data
elements?
An Unpleasant Surprise
You may be surprised by the inaccuracy of the data
within your databases. According to a recent Sales &
Marketing Institute paper, 62% of business contact
information will change within a single year.
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Based on our experience with the D&B database, we’ve When Four Can Equal One
found that in just one hour:

When multiple departments are entering data, their

• 200 business telephone numbers will change or be
priorities may differ when capturing customer
disconnected
information. Sales may require a physical address while
• 54 business addresses will change
accounting may need a mailing address; both are
• 92 directorship (CEO, CFO, etc.) changes will occur
interested in reaching different contacts; marketing is
• 74 new businesses will open their doors
capturing data such as industry code for targeting.
• 7 companies will change their names
• 2 businesses will file for bankruptcy
The solution is simple: have your customer database
analyzed first to find duplicates, then use that process
This data churn can cause significant inaccuracies within
to determine which data should be merged into the
your databases. Fortunately, these inaccuracies can be
consolidated record (see figure 1).
detected and corrected. By matching your customer
information against a current source of business
Notice that a unique identifying number was added to
information, you can enrich your customer records with
the consolidated customer record. This number will
the most recent information available. A process like
allow you to easily match your customer records across
this can occur in real time as the data is being entered
multiple systems, update your records with current
or as a batch process overnight, weekly, monthly, or at
information, and append new data from outside sources.
any other interval based on needs and volume.
It is important that you develop a unique identifier
This will provide you with an accurate source of data
for each of your customers and prospects. With
for your enterprise CDI initiative.
information changing so rapidly, this number will make
your processing much easier and more efficient.

Multiple Unlinked Records Identifying Links Single View

Single, detailed view
ABC, Inc of customer information
220 Main St. across disparate systems,
Bethlehem, PA 18025 eliminating duplication
D-U-N-S No: 123456789
Chuck Smith, Pres.
ABC, Inc. ABC, Inc.
(Legal Name) 123 Elm St
Chuck’s Mini-Mart + Chuck’s Mini-Mart Bethlehem, PA
123 Elm St. (Tradestyle)
10825
Bethlehem, PA 18025 + APEX Real Estate
Chuck Smith, Pres. 610 882-7600
(Tradestyle)
610 882-4545 P.O. Box 111
(Mailing address) P.O. Box 111
APEX Real Estate Bethlehem, PA 18055 Bethlehem, PA
P.O. Box 22 (P.O. Box ZIP) 18055
Bethlehem, PA 18055 123 Elm St
610 882-7600 (Physical Address) President: Chuck
Bethlehem, PA 10825 Smith
(Physical ZIP)
Chuck Smith 610 882-7600
890 Eaton Ave. (Current Phone Number)
Bethlehem, PA 18055
610 882-7600

Figure 1: Matching and consolidating customer records

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Correcting Faulty Logic These problems can be resolved by running logic tests
against your information to ensure that the right data
is in the right field. You will need to once again match
Another data quality issue may arise if the data is
your database against a business file that has the
entered in the incorrect field. You may review your data
breadth and depth to accommodate your need to find
and find phone numbers in the address field or contact
missing information.
names within a city field.

The completeness of your data may fall short and not
be actionable as a result. For example, you may have
records that do not contain the complete name of a
company, are missing an area code, or offer just a first
name of a contact.
It is hard to track an offer if your mail is returned because
of an incomplete mail address. Telemarketing
campaigns are difficult to run without complete phone
numbers. And invoices do not get paid on time if they
are sent to the wrong party or are delayed in delivery.
Companies usually do not understand that poor data
quality is a huge hidden cost to their business.
Step 2: Enrich Your
Information
Adding the Missing Ingredients
Once records are cleansed and identified, the next step
adds value by enriching customer data to add insight
and show previously hidden up-sell and cross-sell
opportunities. Additional and third-party information
provides you with a multidimensional customer view
and increases the business value of your customer
information.

To sum things up, The Data Warehousing Institute
stated that U.S. businesses suffer “losses, problems or
costs” of more than $600 billion per year due to poor-
quality data.
Business information that can enrich your existing records
includes SIC codes, sales volumes, number of employees,
net worth, executive names, and predictive scores, among
hundreds of other variables. Valuable insight on home-
based businesses can include age range, presence of
children, education, length of residence, and more.

Your Cleansed and

Matched Data Integrated Commercial Insight on Your Customer

Gorman Manufacturing, Inc Gorman Manufacturing, Inc Expected spend on technology

D/B/A Gorman Plastics
D/B/A APEX Real Estate
P.O. Box 111
Bethlehem, PA 18055
123 Elm St.
Bethlehem, PA 18025
Charles Smith, President
Beth Parker, VP Marketing
Chris White, Controller
610 882-7600
Credit Limit: $20,000
Outstanding Receivables:
$1,975
No accounts overdue
12 service calls made
D/B/A Gorman Plastics Likelihood to respond to a credit
D/B/A APEX Real Estate card offer
P.O. Box 111 Current and trend spend on products
Bethlehem, PA 18055 Year incorporated: 1965
123 Elm St. Year started: 1985
Bethlehem, PA 18025 Industry: Commercial printing
Charles Smith, President S.I.C.: 2752
Beth Parker, VP Marketing Employees: 120
Chris White, Controller Net worth: $3,486,291
610 882-7600 Chief executive:
Credit Limit: $20,000
Charles Leslie Smith, President
Outstanding Receivables:
This is a headquarters location.
$1,975
No accounts overdue
12 service calls made

Figure 2: Enriching your customer records

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 Finding the Missing Link
Companies typically identify their best customers based
on the assumption that each customer is separate
and unrelated. Figure 3 seems to indicate that “Jones
Inc.” is the largest customer based on the amount it
spends. But is this enough information to draw that
conclusion? You need to get a multi-dimensional view
of your customers to truly uncover the largest and most
profitable.
Now that we know how many customer locations are
currently buying from you, what about the other
locations? Corporate linkage reveals the entire corporate
family (figure 5), exposing significant new “white space”
or growth opportunities, where existing relationships
can be leveraged to increase sales.
Now imagine how many previously unseen
relationships are in your customer base.
In the United States alone there are:

• More than 357,000 corporate families with

2.5 million total members (and of these companies,
Jones Inc. Smith Co. Gorman Co. Gupta Inc. Chen & Co.
308,000 are smaller corporate families having
$350K $100K $200K $300K $150K between 2 and 5 members)
• More than 900,000 instances of “alternative
hierarchy”—franchises, minority interests, vehi-
cle dealerships, agents, health care networks, etc.
• In-depth information on millions of small
Figure 3: Revealing ... or misleading? office/home office (SOHO) businesses

According to IDC, “the ability to create a 360-degree
view of customers is the second most difficult technical
challenge facing businesses.” But corporate linkage
makes it much easier and faster. An often-overlooked
component of the single customer view, corporate
linkage ties together the locations of a company,
revealing previously unseen relationships.
Figure 4 illustrates that SGG is really the largest
customer:
SGG Inc.
$600K
Corporate
Headquarters
Corporate linkage can help you manage credit risk
globally by corporate family tree. Using business credit
information in your sales & marketing efforts allows
you to select only the most creditworthy targets for your
direct mail, telemarketing, and other demand generation
efforts.
Information + Analysis = Insight
Starting with the raw prospect and customer
information from various source systems around your
enterprise, and after applying Step 1 (Cleanse and
Identify) and Step 2 (Enrich), you can do some powerful
types of analysis—delivering “commercial insight”:

• Marketing – segmentation analysis, penetration

analysis, predictive modeling for campaign
Jones Inc.
$350K
Smith Co.
$100K
Gorman Co.
$200K
Gupta Inc.
$300K
Chen & Co.
$150K
responses and customer retention
(Single Location) (Subsidiary) (Subsidiary) (Subsidiary) (Single Location)
• Sales – revenue analysis and sales team assignment
by corporate family
Figure 4: Insight from corporate linkage • Finance – any number of operational analyses using
the enriched information, as well as having visibility
Corporate linkage provides better insight into which into global credit risk by corporate family
customers are really your largest.

6
 SGG Inc. New
$600K Growth
Corporate Opportunities
Headquarters

Smith Co. Gorman Co. Gupta Inc.

$100K $200K $300K
20 more (Subsidiary) (Subsidiary) (Subsidiary) 50 more
Branches of Branches
Smith Co. of Gupta Inc.

35 more 50 more 10 more

Subsidiaries Subsidiaries Subsidiaries
of Smith Co. of Gorman Co. of Gupta Inc.

Figure 5: The corporate family revealed

But the process—and the business value—shouldn’t

stop there. Purely analytic applications (such as a
business intelligence system, data warehouse, or
data mart) are definitely useful to the enterprise but
tend to solve only part of the problem. To provide the
full benefit of the single customer view, you need to
move beyond data warehousing to customer data
integration.

7
Step 3: Manage and Share
Your Insight
Starting with raw prospect and customer data and
applying Step 1 (Cleanse and Identify) and Step 2 (Enrich)
enables some powerful analyses. The output is
“commercial insight”—accurate, complete, timely, and
consistent information that can drive business results.
But taking it to the next level—a single customer view—
requires three other things:
• A single repository into which the cleansed and
enriched data can be loaded
• Some type of integration software or middleware
to synchronize data between that repository and
the original source systems (plus other databases
and applications around the enterprise)
• A continuous, repeatable data governance process
(and corresponding organization) to actively manage
the valuable asset that this insight has become
There are several activities that fall under these three
headings. The integration effort to design, develop, and
deploy the repository (whether you use an off-the-shelf
solution or build your own custom repository) is
considerable. Implementing robust middleware to give
you the synchronization capabilities you’ll need is also
not a trivial exercise.
Vote for Governance
But most of your energy should go into designing an
effective data governance organization and process for
your enterprise.
From an organizational perspective, there needs to be
some type of enterprise-wide data governance council,
with a data management team to handle the day-to-
day stewardship of this critical corporate asset.
From a process perspective, you’ll need to create “closed-
loop” business processes for data quality management,
and then regularly monitor data quality metrics.
Quality is the Key
And don’t forget about the information and its quality.
Data quality and enrichment, as we’ve discussed in
8
Steps 1 and 2, are critical. Otherwise, you’ll continue to
suffer from the “garbage in, garbage out” syndrome,
except now you’ll be compounding the problem by
consolidating bad data from all over the enterprise and
synchronizing it to all of the downstream systems.
And without the Identify and Enrichment processes,
you’ll struggle with finding and resolving duplicate
records, and you’ll have only the organization’s “internal”
view to go by—you’ll be missing out on the widely
accepted external identifiers, the corporate family tree
view, and other valuable demographic and predictive
attributes.
D&B provides the necessary information and services,
but just as importantly it can also provide the expertise.
D&B’s global database of 110 million records is the world’s
largest, most successful CDI initiative. And the processes
D&B uses to manage that repository—and the expertise
it can share with you—in many ways are the “hidden
gem” embedded in its products and its people.
The Bottom Line—
a Single Customer View
Delivers Results
With the single customer view—enabled by high-
quality, up-to-date, and accurate commercial insight—
you’ll confidently deliver the right solution to the right
customer. You’ll be able to:
• Maximize revenue growth and ROI through effective
segmentation and targeting, as well as leveraging
cross-sell and up-sell opportunities
• Increase customer satisfaction by targeting the right
customer with individualized, appropriate solutions
• Grow revenue by recognizing cross-sell opportunities
within different areas of a customer’s organization
• Increase operational efficiencies by consolidating,
cleansing, and enriching data
• Ensure compliance with external rules and
regulations (e.g., Office of Foreign Assets Control,
USA PATRIOT Act, National Do Not Call Registry),
privacy concerns, and internal policies through
accurate record identification
A Single Customer View in Action
Case Study: Office supplier increases revenue from small office/home office customers
A major office supply company, with a mix of business
and consumer customers, sells through retail stores,
call centers, and over the Web, and derives a large
percentage of its total revenue outside of the United
States. Like many sophisticated marketers, this office
supplier realizes that the key to increasing revenue is
through deeper knowledge of its customers.
The company has identified the SOHO market as a key
growth area. These customers spend more (on average)
per person, and buyers typically buy for both business
and personal use at the same time. But the company is
struggling to identify exactly which customers fit
this group—which are small businesses, which are
individuals operating businesses out of their homes,
and which are really consumers buying office supplies
for personal use?
It needs to maximize revenue growth and ROI through
effective segmentation and targeting, and to leverage
cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
After first bringing together customer data from all of
its global operations, the company will apply U.S. and
global data cleansing. Then it will assign persistent
identifiers such as D&B’s D-U-N-S® Number for
businesses and Acxiom’s AbiliTec® link for consumers,
to drive de-duplication, avoid mailing more than one
direct mail piece, and bring the cleansed data back into
its Customer Data Integration hub as part of its “Single
View of the Customer” initiative. Finally, the company
will enrich its original data with additional information
to drive targeting of up-sell and cross-sell opportunities
in the SOHO customer base.
D&B Optimizer – Powered by Acxiom can help by
cleansing the customer records, matching them to
widely accepted business and consumer identifiers,
and enriching them with value-added information,
transforming them into up-to-date, accurate, and
actionable commercial and consumer insight.
Business information from D&B includes SIC codes,
sales figures, employee size, corporate family trees,
predictive scores, and hundreds of other attributes.
Acxiom’s InfoBase consumer information includes age
range, presence of children, education, length of
residence, and more. Together, these two
complementary “external views” dramatically increase
the power of the analytic models that the company’s
marketing team is building to drive a successful
campaign, generate demand, and increase revenue.
By using the cleansed, identified, and enriched
information according to the best practices
recommended by D&B and Acxiom®, this company can
identify different SOHO sub-segments. By putting
carefully crafted marketing messages in front of those
customers, and through deep knowledge of its
customers, their needs, and their probable response
patterns, the company can increase revenue from SOHO
customers significantly over a twelve-month period. By
delivering the right offer to the right customer, this
customer expects to maximize revenue growth while
achieving operational efficiencies.
The End Result: When retail companies apply state-of-
the-art targeting and segmentation techniques normally
applied to consumers, response rates can soar. This
customer expects to increase revenue with a payback
period of less than a year.
9
Case Study: Leading high-tech company implements a global “named account” sales
strategy and consolidates customer databases from merger and acquisition activity

A large high-tech company wants to implement a global
“named account” sales strategy. Knowing that
successfully moving from pure geographic territories
to a named account approach would build stronger
relationships and increase revenue, the company is
struggling to recognize when customers belong to a
corporate family if company names are different. And
the company typically makes 1–2 new acquisitions per
quarter, so the named account strategy has to provide
for ongoing consolidation of customer lists from those
acquisitions.
This company has a large, diverse customer base, serving
large customers through its direct sales force, and
serving smaller customers through its indirect channel.
There are two challenges when looking at any customer
or potential customer. First, the company has to
determine quickly whether that customer is part of a
corporate family tree and, if so, which sales team is
responsible for that corporate family. Second, the
company needs to understand the customer’s
demographic characteristics (industry classification,
number of employees, annual revenue, etc.) to know
whether an internal sales team or a channel partner
should handle that account.
• Through Acxiom, D&B provides access to the
largest database of U.S. consumer data (enabling
identification of home-based businesses) and
delivers increased throughput and capacity
These capabilities allow the company to identify the
customers that should be managed by its direct sales
force, and confidently group those customers into
corporate families to which its best sales people can be
assigned. This can solve a major business problem
without requiring a huge commitment of IT resources.
The Optimizer solution can identify which businesses
should have a direct sales team assigned and which
should be handled by the channel, and group accounts
into corporate families even when company names are
were radically different.
The End Result: By using D&B to drive the transition
to a global “named account” strategy, this company can
build a process that would handle not only its current
prospect and customer list, but also part of the
integration of newly acquired companies. The company
can confidently “hit the ground running” by selling its
combined offerings to both its current and newly
acquired customers.

D&B Optimizer – Powered by Acxiom can enable this

company’s transition from simple geographic territories
to named accounts. The company can cleanse all of its
prospects and customers, match those records to the
D&B D-U-N-S Number®, and then enrich its prospects
and customers with corporate family tree information
and other demographic data.

The D&B/Acxiom® relationship means that D&B

customers get faster “time to value” and can process
files of unlimited size:

• D&B is the world’s largest single source of global

business information, so you can get enhanced infor-
mation on more businesses in your database

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D&B Solutions for Customer
Data Integration
D&B is the world’s leading source of business
information and commercial insight on the companies
that are important to your business. With commercial
insight from D&B, you will establish and build
significantly more profitable business relationships
with your customers, prospects, and suppliers—globally.
Acxiom integrates data, services, and technology to
create and deliver customer and information
management solutions for many of the largest, most
respected companies in the world. The core components
of Acxiom’s innovative solutions are customer data
integration (CDI) technology, data, database services,
IT outsourcing, consulting and analytics, and privacy
leadership.
Transform
Customer
Info Cleanse
Commercial
Insight
Identify
Prospect
Info
Enrich
Refresh
In August 2006, D&B and Acxiom announced a joint
product and technology relationship that significantly
increases the speed, capacity, and automation
capabilities of D&B Solutions for Customer Data
Integration, the critical success factor to enable effective
customer relationship management, business
intelligence, and sales and marketing execution.
Our solutions transform customer and prospect
information into up-to-date, accurate, and actionable
commercial insight, enabling a single customer view.
With that single customer view, you will confidently
deliver the right solution to the right customer,
maximizing revenue growth while delivering
operational efficiencies.
For more information about D&B Solutions for Customer
Data Integration, please visit www.dnb.com/cdi.
Manage
Integrate
Single
View
Link/Group
Maintain
11
D&B Solutions
Risk Management Solutions
Sales & Marketing Solutions
Supply Management Solutions
E-Business Solutions

www.dnb.com/cdi

©2007 The Dun and Bradstreet Corporation MCM-007-007

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D&B assumes no responsibility for the accuracy of the information presented, which is subject to change without notice.