A New Company With a New Tool

A newly formed firm with a new tool introduced this week has analysts saying that the next phase in customer analytics is here. The Purisma Customer Registry, a customer identity management (CIM) tool, provides B2B companies with the ability to relate customers to each other and understand how they are doing business with different subsidiaries. Purisma avers that Customer Registry lets organizations recognize their data problems in a matter of days and resolve them in a matter of weeks. It is designed to decipher complex relationships, and correlates and identifies data for consumer and commercial accounts regardless of their corporate structure, hierarchy, subsidiaries, or site locations. "Providing employees with single-view-of-the-customer applications enables customer-facing personnel to better understand customers and deliver high-impact interactions, [but] customer satisfaction can be increased via single-face-to-the-company applications like portals which offer faster, more efficient service at reduced costs," says Pete Daffern, Purisma's new CEO and former president and COO of AIM Technology. "Customer-centric applications require a reliable foundation of customer identities to ensure comprehensive, accurate customer information. [Purisma] recognizes that customers may be complex organizations or have intricate but critical relationships." The tool supports what Purisma calls the four Rs necessary for a full CIM solution: recognize, relate, reference, and reconcile. It connects via Web services to enterprisewide systems, databases, and external data sources to recognize relationships between account records or contacts using rules-based algorithms and multipass correlation. The registry then relates and incorporates applied organizational and relationship data into customer identities, allowing organizations to define corporate hierarchies between a parent company and a subsidiary. It also references corporate hierarchies imported from internal CRM systems or external sources like D&B. Last, Purisma provides a data stewardship application to reconcile and handle exceptions and control processes in case of inaccuracies that might occur from automated matching. According to Jill Dyche, Baseline Consulting partner and cofounder, the tool is "a fantastic enhancement to any company that's been struggling with CRM or has deployed CRM and is still struggling with the customer hierarchy. This stuff can be a make-or-break proposition. Purisma is really the go-to company for B2B customer hierarchy management." Larger B2B companies stand to benefit the most, and companies managing business relationships off Excel spreadsheets or trying to install a BI tool are not ready for customer data integration, according to Dyche. Many of the Fortune 1,000 companies have a load of inaccurate data, so even the best analytic tools won't generate the most accurate results, Daffern says. Purisma introduces and deploys its technology on site before a customer buys the product. "We're looking for the wow factor of how many issues they have in the database and how fast we can solve those issues," he says. "The dirty little secret is their data [stinks]," Dyche says. "Data is a big deal." Technology is allowing companies to do sophisticated matching to identify a customer with other relationship information, enabling them to identify their best customers and generate more revenue from them, says Aaron Zornes chief research officer at The CDI Institute. "We're seeing convergence between consumer and product data. Corporations are finally getting the tools to do this corporate data governance," Zornes says. "Customer information truly is a corporate asset and it needs to be managed formerly. This is the true meaning of integration." Related articles: Master Data Management Beyond BI at BetterManagement Live