What Does Customer Information Management Mean?
Customer information management (CIM) is the practice of managing customer data in an enterprise. It is a broad-level term that relates to the wider category of master data management. In CIM, IT professionals deal with all of the customer identifiers and data points that exist within a given business architecture.
Techopedia Explains Customer Information Management
One way to describe customer information management (CIM) is to contrast it with similar terms. For instance, customer relationship management is a term for systems and tools that help businesses work better with customers in communications or analyze ongoing deals or potential deals. By contrast, CIM is the process of getting bits of isolated data about customers and managing them as a whole or deploying them to places where they can do the most good.
Customer information management is typically done across an architecture. For instance, if staffers are cross-indexing accounts to provide more readily accessible customer identifiers or names, or account histories, that would constitute CIM. In doing CIM, workers may need to deal with analyzing more structured or less structured data — for example, collecting stray bits of information from Internet forums or mining customer names and numbers from letters or other print communications.
The end goal of CIM is to order all of the information that a business has about customers in any part of its software architecture, breaking down data silos, so that the business has the best intelligence and benefits the most from its data assets.
