Information Management and Usage Findings

Our contention is that each of these performance areas (sections) can be a pocket of good practice in isolation, but their true benefits emerge when they are effectively integrated. In other words, an organization can demonstrate excellence in one or more of these areas; however, unless all areas are being actively improved, there will be barriers to achieving best practice. The Acxiom-sponsored subset of questions combined with pre-existing CMAT questions about information management and usage yield a total of 22 best-practice areas on the subject. These areas of analysis are designed to test how organizations currently compare with best practice in key aspects of information management and usage, and to indicate whether organizations are taking a wide enough view on the issue to enable future best practice.

The issues specifically tested in this research project and the average scores are shown in Figure 13.3. These scores reveal that there are many areas for improvement in customer information management and usage in support of CRM. Overall, the results indicate that there is a lot of work being done toward achieving best practice in information management and usage. There is also a growing awareness of the importance of better leveraging customer data in support of customer management to achieve real results, although the presence of an enterprise customer information plan is still one of the lowest scoring areas.

Figure 13.3: CMAT-R Subset Scores (Based on 22 Areas Related to Information Management and Usage)

Another low-scoring area, appropriate access to customer data across the organization, is still a major point of contention for most of the organizations interviewed, who truly need broader, more complete and accurate customer data to be more readily available. Furthermore, access to certain analytical measures of customer value - customer worth, lifetime value or even reason for loss -was the weakest scoring area of the analysis.

To provide a more useful interpretation of the research findings, a set of best-practice information management and usage recommendations was created based on the research results, and they are discussed in the next section.