operational, analytical and customer contact applications and databases) were rarely designed to work together and the data they collect and use are not normally collected, structured or quality-assessed for the CRM purposes for which they are eventually used. Financial services and other companies around the world face these data quality and integration issues. This case study describes a real (but anonymous) US financial services project, BUSINESS BACKGROUND: ACHIEVING RETURN ON INVESTMENT FROM CRM PROJECTS The authors' research shows that customer relationship management (CRM) projects can achieve higher rates of return by work on data quality. Existing and new data need to be integrated and shared, with updates synchronised among many different systems. These systems (including