Find it, filter it and flaunt it. Successful financial institutions are coming to understand, its not about staid system integration approaches or the hottest new CRM product. Cross system aggregation and effective filtering of customer data is the key to ensuring the Customer Experience is successful. Providing more and better product offerings to an ever increasing customer base will be the prize to those executives that align their enterprise to consolidated, accurate, and seamless customer data.

From the mainframe systems and data stores of old to the recently implemented data mining applications "guaranteed" to increase cross and upsells across all product segments, customer data resides in many and varied functional and system silos. To get to the customer data nirvana of pure and up-to-date customer data, institutions must become religious about coordinating all customer data across the enterprise and directing the enterprise to treat customer data as if it were a holy grail of sorts. Too often there are multiple "data troughs" within an organization, each functional and systems area looking to get to multiple data stores to capture, cultivate and captivate decision makers on the relative importance the most recent "batch" report.

All system and functional areas should act to coordinate their data efforts to that of a truly centralized data picture. While the data may physically reside in multiple stores and even across platforms, an aggregated, central view of the customer is the only way to ensure the proper systems and product offerings are made available when the customer needs or wants them. All areas feed off the same data. Processes and protections need to be placed on the enterprises capture, maintenance and use of this all-important lifeblood. If senior management can agree to commit their divisions to supporting a long and tedious challenge the benefits will be astounding.

In order to get a true picture of what the customer looks like, institutions must exhaustively understand where all the data is, evaluate that data for accuracy and duplicity, make thoughtful and constantly updated decisions on how to scrub the data and utilize the data in such a way that leads an ever improving and expanding customer experience. By employing a well thought out, consistent, and dedicated approach to logically centralizing customer data, financial institutions can in effect create a environment that allows for the mass customization of systems, services and products that the customer not only need and expects but those products he or she may not have otherwise realize she wanted. Thus guaranteeing a positive customer experience and leading to an ever-increasing share of wallet by increasing the number of products the customer purchases from your institution.