What is a customer account record?
A customer account record is the basic unit of information about a customer that resides in a CRM, or customer relationship management system.
A customer account record -- also known as a customer record -- holds critical data about a customer, including the standard data, such as name, order data, billing information, interaction information and credit information.
What data do customer account records include?
In addition to standard data, companies are able to augment customer record information with new forms of data, such as social media handles, comments from forums or blog post data, and profile information from social media platforms, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
A customer account record can also augment a company's consumer knowledge with third-party information, such as industry information -- as well as information about a customer's role as a decision-maker within the organization -- to flesh out the customer's wider buying influence. Often, some of this new data is unstructured data, or not easily categorized in a traditional column-based database format, so companies may have to find new ways to include this unstructured information in traditional customer account data.
Combining data from multiple communication channels, particularly newer avenues of communication such as social media or a live chat window, has proved challenging for companies. This combined view of customer data from all sources, also referred to as the 360-degree customer view, is sometimes more aspirational than reality.
