We all know that the ultimate goal of CRM is to achieve a consolidated, 360-degree view of the customer at any touch point. We know that when companies know more about their customers, they can provide better service and personalized marketing and selling – which translates into more profitable customer relationships. But the reality for most organizations is that customer data is spread far and wide across departmental and organizational boundaries. Even when customer data is gathered into a centralized location, customer information is often not useful because customer-facing applications do not have access to it. Traditional efforts to provide access to customer information from all applications have required protracted custom integration projects and have met with limited success. However, the advent of Web services offers faster, standardsbased integration for low cost, rapid ROI – and along with it, renewed hope for the success of CRM implementations.

Consider the challenge faced by telecommunication companies that generate customer information from a variety of customer touch points. Billing, order processing, and field service departments interact with customers through various channels – monthly bills, telesales representatives, and onsite service calls. To ensure a high-quality customer experience, they all need a complete view of customer data. But with data scattered across multiple systems, displaying accurate, current customer information is difficult.

Similarly, manufacturing enterprises that work with partners to install and service their products often run into trouble when customers change their minds about an order. While the customer may cancel the order with the manufacturer, the service partner is often not notified in time to cancel delivery and installation services because the partners' systems is not linked in to the manufacturer's systems. Or perhaps the technician brings the wrong parts or tools to complete a repair because he does not have access to the customer's current install base. Those of us who have spent countless hours on the phone with customer service representatives know of this issue first-hand. With these frustrations, the customer will go elsewhere to place their next order.

The two situations outlined above illustrate two central challenges plaguing CRM implementations:
1.  Consolidation of transactional customer data
2.  The ability for customer-facing applications to access customer data

Companies can consolidate operational customer data using prebuilt repositories available from select enterprise applications vendors, or they can build one internally. Once cleansed and aggregated data from all data sources is loaded into a single repository, all systems would need to read from and write to that single repository in real time, or at the very least operate locally but synchronize with it in real time.

For a "single source of customer truth" to be of use, enterprises have to integrate all potential customer- facing applications to the customer data repository. However, companies have found that proprietary integration is not only time intensive and costly, but also is inordinately expensive to maintain. Worse, integration is inflexible; changes in operations or acquisitions and divestitures suddenly render the systems useless. Often, companies decide to forgo all but the essential integration points. The result? The customer information lies untouched.

Enter Web services. Web services excel at providing access to your customer data. They are based on open standards, which means that you don't need access to specialized proprietary skills to deploy or subscribe to Web services. They are quick to deploy because all systems use the same protocol. Many different systems can call the same Web service for updates, i.e. fewer Web services replace a large number of integrations. They are simple – one system merely calls another using the predefined protocols and triggers a process, or obtains information. Even partners and other parties can subscribe to the very same Web services, greatly lowering the cost of collaboration as well as vastly increasing the possibilities for partnering.

Web services will be most useful, and widely usable, if they comply with widely subscribed standards for business objects, such as those published by the Open Applications Group Inc.(OAGI) and other standards groups. OAGI standards for CRM objects are under development. Industry-specific standards similar in concept to OAGI, likeRosettaNet for high tech and HL7 for healthcare, but for industry-specific business objects and processes are in development. These standards, depending on their adoption, will determine Web services' value in communicating and leveraging customer data among companies within the same industry.

Until standards are widely available and subscribed to, you will have to agree on an internal standard such that each Web service you make available encompasses all your internal applications as well as those of partners. Be sure to ask your CRM vendor if they have delivered Web services to consolidate and access customer data. While Web services aren't the only tool you will need to mine your customer information, used strategically they will take you a long way toward a successful CRM implementation that improves customer satisfaction and encourages ongoing, profitable customer relationships.

About the Author
John Wookey is senior vice president of Oracle Applications, responsible for the Sales and Marketing products lines of Oracle's CRM suite, as well as Oracle's Healthcare, Life Sciences, and Student Systems development. Since joining Oracle in 1995, John has also worked with a number of Oracle Applications development groups, including financial applications, Oracle projects, applications globalization, and financial services. john.wookey@oracle.com