How can integrating Business Applications help grow your business?

By Todd Fleming,
Senior Consultant, Microsoft Business Solutions, BroadPoint Technologies

The goal of integrating business applications is to consolidate key data from all systems that are customer touch points into one system accessible to all departments within your company. This allows each person within the company to have a complete view of the customer without having to research the customer's activities in all business applications used by the company. It allows your staff to sound more knowledgeable about your customers needs and therefore able to respond quicker to their inquiries.

Why retaining existing customers is so important

• Research has shown that a 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10% and a 5% reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125%, depending on the industry. ("Leading on the Edge of Chaos", Emmett C. Murphy and Mark A. Murphy)
  
• "It costs the average business 5 to 10 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain and existing one." The Loyalty Effect & Loyalty Rules Marketing Metrics 2002
  
• Most business leaders (80%) believe they do a good job in building customer relationships, while only 8% of customers agree, according to research from The Whetstone Edge
  

Benefits of integrating business applications

• Allows you to better understand your customer's needs
  
• Allows you to more quickly respond to customer inquiries
  
• Provides for a more personal relationship with your customers
  
• Provides for better analysis and future decision making in meeting your customer's ongoing needs
  
• Reduces the need for duplicate entry and increases data accuracy
  

Things to consider when choosing an Integration Solution

The ideal integration solution allows the company's applications to communicate and exchange business transactions, messages, and data with each other using standard interfaces. It enables applications to transfer data in real-time or in scheduled batches in either a bidirectional or unidirectional configuration. The four elements needed in an integration solution include:

• Management - The Integration solution should include an interface for data administration and data management tasks. The interface should allow for management of rules, scheduling of jobs, system configuration and other administrative tasks such as configuration of alerts and notifications.
  
  
• Data Cleansing - Data cleansing tasks should be part of the integration process prior to loading the master data source. The integration solution should include a tool for cleansing and matching data and the ability to update records when matches are found.
  
  
• Customer Cross Reference - An Integration Solution must include customer reference data for all connected applications and must communicate any changes in the master data to all affected applications. The repository needs to have the ability to manage unique master record keys and associated cross-reference keys that link back to source systems.
  
  
• Scalability - An Integration solution with low cost of ownership for enterprises requires the ability to easily extend the solution to other data sources or eliminate existing data sources as your business needs grow and change.
  

When implementing application integration technologies, the idea is to make the company more effective, more profitable, a better business partner and more accessible to its many clients. Integrating business applications allow you to consolidate and manage customer information from all available sources so that all departments in the company have access to the most current, complete, and comprehensive view of customer information. Doing so can greatly aid in the customer retention and customer acquisition process having a positive impact on your company's profitability.