The information available to an organisation is the platform on which all else is built.

Ideally, organisations should be looking to gather 7 inter-related types of data on their customer base:

• individual customer identification data (names, addresses etc)
• transaction data (at individual transaction/ line item level)
• data about the products and services made available to customers
• data about the offers through which these products and services were made available to customers (location, price, dates etc)
• data on the sales channels and outlets through which these products and services are offered to customers
• data about the marketing campaign activity through which products and services are promoted to customers
• data on all customer interactions with the organisation (inbound and outbound across all touch-points)