In previous blogs on the First Time Right (FTR)-principle, we’ve talked about preventing that your data becomes polluted. After reading the white paper on FTR you might want to see some actual examples. Yesterday, I have seen some demo’s and trials from our development group (special thanks to Kasper Sørensen and Ankit Kumar!) that I want to share. Look and play with it and give me feedback how to improve things. The demos are focussed only on guiding the user to provide correct names (so I’m aware that email, telephone, address, etc is not yet incorporated).

The first demo is a mockup for Microsoft CRM. You should go to the name fields (First name and Last name) and see how the entry form is helping you to guide you to correct names. I need to admit that the Microsoft CRM demo works better in Internet Explorer (I wonder why …. ;-).

The second demo shows the key possibilities of HIquality Name Worldwide in a Linkedin mockup.

I am enthusiastic about the ease to integrate the first time right mechanism in a web form (or any application with a web UI). Engineers showed me that it’s quite non-intrusive, they added five lines in the beginning of the page and it is working already.

The added value of an integrated customer view depends strongly on the quality of that integrated customer view. Every organization that is seriously planning to create a single customer view should ask itself the following question: “What determines the quality of my customer view and so the accompanying level of added value?”

Prior to answering this question we need to take one step back. Why does not every organization have a single customer view? The cause lies in the fact that many organizations have their customer data spread across multiple systems all facilitating separate business processes. Additionally customer data is often highly polluted, fragmented and incomplete.

So it appears that the data itself plays a crucial role in the lack of an integrated customer view. Or more accurately, the better the data – the better the customer view. And the better the data matching of customer records across separate systems the better the integrated customer view.

So Data Quality and Matching (Identity Resolution) determine in large parts the quality of the integrated customer view and the added value that it delivers. Take a look at this demo showing a step-by-step approach how to build a single customer view and get a better idea of the role of Data Quality and Matching within this process.

Try the widget below which works with Dutch postcode and house number data. A simple input of two fields returns full address details including geocoding with map reference. If you are not familiar with the dutch postcode structure try with the following data: 6812 AR / 310.