Hi Topliners!
I thought I would post some details of a recent email I received from a company considering Eloqua and ask if you could take a minute and provide some real life experience on the subject - data consolidation into Eloqua from a number of systems/data repositories beyond just CRM. I hope that creating this thread will be helpful for a broader audience of existing and future members of the Eloqua Community. Thank you in advance for your replies...
"We are in the process of building a marketing database. There are a number of challenges in this effort ranging from data residing in disparate systems to multiple entries for the same customers. Before we continue down a manual path of cleaning the data we thought it best to understand not only the capabilities of Eloqua, but also the data requirements. Below is a list of our current challenges that are being addressed manually. Can Eloqua assist in these issues and/or how important are they to implementing the Eloqua program?
- Multiple customer numbers for one customer, however there critical data attached to each customer number (for example, one number may be for Product Line A and another may be for Product Line B) – I know Eloqua only allows one customer number, what logic is used to consolidate the information?
- Disparate systems house various information. For example, the contract information is in one system, the services are in another, detail product information is in yet another. – Can Eloqua pull info in from various systems and make one record or do we have to bring in the “clean” records with all the data?
- Multiple different contacts in multiple systems – same issue as in the first bullet
Bottom line is how clean does the data going into Eloqua need to be, how does Eloqua assist in that effort, and what are critical data elements to have prior to launching Eloqua to ensure its success?"