to recruit new customers, sell more to existing customers, support customer service operations and retain customers. This meant bringing data from various systems together, adding new and relevant customer data. These data are typically sourced from several operational or product systems, as well as from marketing, sales and service systems. So interdepartmental systems evolved, with interfaces between them. The last few Why data quality has become a big issue in managing customers In many companies, customer data were originally collected and managed departmentally-and in some they still are. Companies have been collecting customer data for years, usually for customer administration. In the 1980s, some larger companies started to collect more customer data and use them for what was then called database marketing

their customer management strategies on their customer knowledge-IBM's global banking team's work on configuring systems to use customer data-the IBM Business Consulting Services analytics practice, which helps clients get value from their customer dataincluding improving analysis and business processes. In this paper, this information is presented with specific reference to the mobile telephony INTRODUCTION In the first paper in this series of three, the authors examined the theory and concepts of data quality management and briefly highlighted some empirical findings. This paper explains in more detail how these findings relate to using data to develop customer insight. The conceptual and experiential material used in this paper comes from:-QCi's work in helping clients base 240

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.

or negative in impact. For example, an organisation that operates in a business-to-business environment would benefit from understanding organisational structures and linkages between individual sites that it may have identified as customers or prospects. If data on corporate structures either does not exist at all within the selling organisation, or is of poor quality, then various usages of that data-such as key account management, or credit management-will either not happen at all or will be incomplete or ineffectual. In turn, this non-existent or sub-optimal usage of data will limit the frequency with which records are refreshed or updated, further reducing the content or the quality and further negatively BACKGROUND Over recent years, Information Answers has developed a methodology for assessing organisational capabilities around the sourcing, management and use of customer and related information. This methodology, built from the combined experiences of a range of data specialists across many sectors, starts with what the authors term 'the vicious or virtuous circle' of customer data. Figure 1 illustrates the circular relationship between the data available to an organisation, the quality of that data, and the use that is made of that data. Information Answers' experience is that changes made in each of these areas have a 'cascade' effect into the othersand those changes can be either positive

Direct marketing is now faced with endemic crisis. Toxic ingredients of this crisis include rising consumer concerns about privacy and data protection, growing hostility and resistance to unwanted messaging, rising costs, falling returns, increasing concerns about environmental impact, and intensifying regulatory scrutiny and restrictions. Three core characteristics of direct marketing are responsible for these problems; (1) Data management: all responsibility for data management (collection, storage, analysis, usage, etc) lies with the seller; (2) Information fl ows are almost wholly ' top down ' from sellers to buyers in the form of selling messages; (3) Metrics: success is defi ned in sellercentric terms-costs versus benefi ts to the seller. By empowering individuals to collect, store and share rich, up-to-date personal data with suppliers, vendor relationship management (VRM) offers a way through direct marketing ' s current impasse. To realise the new win-wins made possible by VRM, the industry needs to start adjusting now.