Wide-Angle View Of CustomersWide-Angle View Of Customers

The U.S. Postal Service found itself in just that situation. It made the same mistakes as many large organizations--namely, rampant systems development accompanied by poor integration. Some 19 million customer records were spread among more than a dozen systems, from permit and bulk-business mail to official government mail, and none of those systems talked to one another. The result was that business customers were treated as though they were multiple smaller customers, making it impossible for the Postal Service to deliver services that might have helped it as well as its business customers. For instance, sales and marketing might have been able to identify a company that did business with many Postal Service locations and offer a centralized payment tool that would cut down on invoicing and payment-processing expenses. "When you know the true identity of a company, you're able to add more value-added services for them," says Larry Goodman, manager of the Postal Service's sales and marketing business-systems portfolio.

Goodman may not hold a customer knowledge officer title, but he's been charged with bringing together the right mix of IT, sales, and marketing needed to make the Postal Service act more like a single business when engaging customers. Realizing that the systems at a government agency couldn't simply be rebuilt, he has focused instead on initiating a data-cleansing effort that matches all customer records across the disparate systems and establishing a virtual central repository of those customer records that pulls data from the native systems.

With the repository in place, Goodman's team has begun to address data quality, launching an effort late last year to eliminate duplicate customer records, bad addresses, missing information, and any other inconsistencies that would prevent the repository from being a reliable source of customer information. By September 2006, Goodman plans to create a more dynamic customer-registration process that will ensure data quality at the point of registration, rather than after the fact.

To do that, data-cleansing techniques will have to be applied to the registration process so that individuals registering as new business customers will be identified both as individuals and as representatives of their companies, thus ensuring that Postal Service systems always have a complete view of its customers regardless of how they identify themselves. "It's going to position us to be a very customer-centric model," Goodman says. "When we have that identity and a process that maintains the identity, we're in a position to better serve the customer."

For Postal Service competitor FedEx Corp., siloed data wasn't the problem. Instead, a lack of customer segmentation was preventing the company from differentiating customer profiles. By the mid-1990s, FedEx understood that it couldn't treat all of its business customers the same, so it began segmenting them based on size. But it wasn't until about five years ago that the company decided to get serious about customer segmentation, and today it's taking a highly granular approach to analyzing and targeting customers. "We look at sizes of segments; opportunities with customers; whether a customer is new; whether we're penetrating, growing, or retaining a relationship; what industry they're in; what distribution model they sell products through; their geographic locations," says Mark Colombo, VP of strategic marketing and corporate strategy. "It takes all that information to understand how customers want FedEx to interact with them."

Colombo's job reaches into every aspect of understanding the customer experience. In addition to overseeing management of core customer information, he has responsibility for tasks such as analyzing FedEx's internal customer-service metrics against the com- pany's external market research and using the resulting data to generate improved understanding of customer behavior and the tendencies of customer microsegments. He then turns that knowledge into insight on which business units can act.

For instance, FedEx knows from its history of customer interactions that a small law office needs constant access to envelopes and services on FedEx.com but that it probably wants as little interaction as possible with salespeople because it can't afford the distractions. Conversely, a large global law firm needs to know how shipping products interact with existing business processes such as mail-room operations, how fast FedEx can create shipping labels, or even how to go about creating a co-branded shipping envelope, all things that are aided by having a sales rep who can double as a customer-service contact.

For a company the size of FedEx, the knowledge needed to work with customers on their terms doesn't come solely from human interaction. It requires constant collection and crunching of data, and that's something FedEx is quite adept at doing. Take a business customer who calls into a contact center. First, the AT&T-hosted interactive voice-response system asks the customer about the purpose of his or her call. The answer not only becomes data itself, but it triggers Cisco Systems' GeoTel software to automatically route the call to an appropriate agent based on the category of the customer's inquiry, presenting the rep with data pulled from an Amdocs Ltd. Clarify customer-relationship-management application.

The customer-service system begins tracking the interaction and collecting all sorts of data. Was the call correctly categorized? Did the tracking even occur? If so, was the support rep courteous and expeditious? Was the customer satisfied? After the interaction, FedEx's marketing department often follows up with a call to the customer to get a firsthand description of the interaction. "What we get is a very good snapshot of internal operating data and external data, and they should be consistent with each other," Colombo says.

Colombo ranks the need to put customer information to use as a top priority for any company that's striving for long-term success. "On a scale of 1 to 10, I would call it out as a 10," he says. "People's expectations have been increasing with the information revolution, and the bar is getting set higher every day. A role like this helps companies better understand customer requirements and deliver to them."