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COPYRIGHT 2001 Ziff Davis Media Inc.
Axa Financial Inc. dodged a big, bad bullet early this year when, soon after launching a new customer Web portal, the financial services company got a call from an irate customer who couldn't register on the site.
AXA officials traced the problem to incomplete customer data coming from one of the company's dozens of legacy systems. Information about 600 of AXA's best financial services customers had been entered into the portal's database minus street addresses. Without them, those customers also would be locked out when they tried to access their account information online.
Before anyone else was inconvenienced, AXA officials fixed the problem and launched a broader investigation. Finding other examples of incomplete or inaccurate data, AXA officials decided to head off future full-fledged online disasters by making formal, enterprisewide data standards a key part of AXA's CRM (customer relationship management) strategy.
"Our CRM applications could only be as good as our data," said Jennifer Schuppert, director of strategic data technology at AXA Client Solutions, in New York. "We knew from the beginning we had to make data quality a part of [CRM] if we had any hope of success."
After years of neglecting the problem or investing millions of dollars and hundreds of man-hours to manually clean up and rework data in a stopgap fashion, many companies, like AXA, are finally getting serious about data quality. And for many of them, CRM is the driver. Why? Because, unlike with earlier generations of back-office systems where inconsistent data merely drove up costs, in e-business, where you're dealing directly with customers, miscues resulting from faulty or incomplete data can drive away business in an instant, experts say.
It's not surprising, then, that data quality is starting to command the attention of top management instead of being passed off to IT. Many e- businesses today...
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