Data Quality and CRM from a Global Perspective

Quick access to complete and accurate data in the Chinese CRM system.

CRM is a business strategy that knows no boundaries, breaking down not only technological but also cultural walls.

In an age where people think and act less and less locally and more and more globally, quality software must be able to adapt to numerous differences in culture, language, programming, data protection or business processes.

What is already common practice in the Western world, is still in its infancy in the Asia-Pacific language region. While Europe and North America represent the pioneers among the CRM markets, the Asian market is just in the middle of the development phase. In China, Japan, Singapore and India, the use of software for data acquisition and maintenance is increasing – and this is especially true of European and American companies, which are pushing into the Far Eastern markets with their products, bringing their existing experience with them to Asia.

If one takes the business strategy for good customer relationship management seriously, one must not lose sight of the quality of the data. Correct addresses are a basic requirement for an effective mail campaign, and error-tolerant search is essential in the call center when it comes to finding difficult and ambiguous customer names. Until recently, the tools for such supporting processes were virtually unavailable on the European tool vendor market. Dealing with Asian character sets and the associated language barrier were too complicated for Europeans.

This gap has now been filled by the Stuttgart-based software provider TOLERANT Software, which has expanded its data quality tools for use in the Asian market. Two automotive manufacturers from southern Germany were the first to use this comparatively new technology in their own Chinese projects. There, they were happy to take up the possibility that address validation and correction, as well as duplicate search, would be available in a comparable way to what was already known from the European projects. The managing director of TOLERANT Software, Stefan Sedlacek, sees his company well prepared for the future:

“With the technological further development of our software suite, we are underlining the high level of competence we already possess in the field of data quality and are responding to the requirements and needs of tomorrow’s market.”