It should come as no surprise that data is a critical component in customer communications management (CCM). Given the amount of time consumers spend on computers and smartphones, personal data is collected from almost every activity we do each day. For companies that create customer communications, the importance of data is obviously not a new concept; however, many organizations face a significant challenge when it comes to extracting relevant data from source systems.

To create personalized, relevant, and timely communications in real time, the data needs to be available in real time.

At Madison Advisors, we work with many large enterprise clients that have multiple lines of business, each with a unique set of core systems. These core systems contain a significant amount of customer and transaction data and are associated with output files in a variety of data formats. The output files become the input for the document composition process. Since these files are not standardized, data preparation and manipulation processes are typically needed to create a standard input file structure. Preparing the data in this way for effective use in customer communications is a critical first step in the document generation life cycle.