It’s basic stuff : if you don’t have the correct address for a customer, you can’t send them invoices. If you don’t have the correct telephone number for a customer – you can’t call them. And if you don’t have the correct information about what they’ve bought from you, then you can’t send them an accurate invoice.
While this may sound like a problem that's easy to address, but the explosion in the number of customer touchpoints for businesses today, an increasing number of computer applications that manage our customer data and old fashioned human error – it can be notoriously difficult thing to get right!
One company, though, that seems to be on the right track is global logistics company Deutsche Post DHL. They’ve been doing some work to improve the customer data management process in their Shared Services function through Business Process Management. In this Process Perspectives podcast, Arthur Seidl, Vice President for Global Process Optimization in the Shared Services Organization describes what they did and how they tackled the problem.