Taking the scale and scope of the customer management issues noted above, Acxiom and QCi jointly developed a series of best practices encompassed in an approach designed to support a chief information officer in developing an enterprise plan for managing and using customer information. The best practices can be pulled together into a broader quantifiable improvement plan. The plan details the short, medium and long-term improvements in customer information management and usage that an organization must undertake to best prepare its data assets for use in customer management. A sample of these best practices is outlined below. The Acxiom-sponsored subset of 22 detailed questions about information management and usage is divided into 10 best-practice categories derived from the CMAT-R results.

• Create an enterprise customer information management plan.

• Obtain resources to support the plan.

• Build measures of data quality.

• Define a single customer view.

• Collect transaction history data.

• Use customer data to understand customer worth, lifetime value, preferences and retention drivers.

• Build a customer infrastructure that supports recognition and welcoming of customers.

• Account for third-party data (intermediation).

• Understand privacy.

• Consider outsourcing business processes.

The individual best practices in information management and usage, and the findings from our sample to date, are detailed below. Each can be seen as a recommendation that, if implemented in isolation, would engender improvement; however, much more improvement is gained if the best practices are performed in an integrated effort across the enterprise.