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Identity Asset Management

Identity Asset Management

Digital identities are assets. Even Facebook identities provide information that can be analyzed and used to refine online services. External identities such as registered customers are high value assets. Acquiring a new customer always incurs cost, sometimes as little as a few $ with fully automated web campaigns to tens of thousands of $ for Fortune 100 company executive contacts.

The employees of your customers’ organizations that are conducting online business with you have their own identities. The traditional way to manage them is to store them inside your CRM system by a sales manager or a customer service desk representative. The important attributes are the phone numbers and e-mail addresses. When these attributes are correct and valid, your inside sales people can call up a customer to generate more revenue, or your marketing department can plan and execute effective campaigns.

But data deteriorates...

In the US, it has been estimated that approximately 20% of the workforce will switch jobs within a year. If you have a customer base of 5,000, it means that you may have upwards of 1,000 outdated contacts within your CRM system next year. This means that your marketing and sales efforts are 20% less effective and translates into potential lost revenue.

The inaccurate data, or so called dirty data, in your CRM accumulates over time, and the importance of data quality has risen considerably during the last decade due to this fact. In the early 2000s, Gartner estimated that over 50% of CRM projects suffered or failed due to data quality issues. There are internal processes and measures that can be taken to ensure consistent and higher quality of customer information, but it's time consuming and requires constant efforts from your organization and therefore takes up time from the tasks that can improve your bottom line. Even with the best of tools and constant vigilance, your customer data will deteriorate - because you just can't know what's happening within your customer organization.

Treat identities as assets, and build a management framework for them. Identity and Access Management (IAM) solutions that enable external users to manage their own identities can help you improve your customer data quality considerably, and lessen the burden of management in your own organization. Identity Asset Management (IAM) and Identity and Access Management (IAM) obviously support each other - they even have the same acronyms.

To learn more about how an IAM solution with CRM integration can benefit you, view our recent webinar, External IAM and Your CRM – A Winning Combination, that we presented with analyst, KuppingerCole.

 

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