History of customer data integration

In the late 1990s Acxiom and GartnerGroup coined the term "customer data integration" (CDI).^{[citation needed]} The process of CDI, as Acxiom and Gartner described it, includes:

1. cleansing, updating, completing contact-data
2. consolidating the appropriate records, purging duplicates and linking records from disparate sources to enable customer or donor recognition at any touch-point
3. enriching internal and transactional data with external knowledge and segmentation
4. ensuring compliance with contact suppression to protect the individual and the organization

As of 2009, service providers deliver CDI as a hosted solution in batch volumes, on demand using a software as a service (SaaS) model, or on-site as licensed software in companies and organizations with the resources to drive their own data integration processing. CDI enables companies to optimize merchandizing (assortment, promotion, pricing and rotation) based on demographics, lifestyle and life-stage, to ensure inventory turn and to reduce waste.^{[citation needed]} CDI also aids companies and organizations in choosing the best location for new branch offices or outlets.^{[citation needed]}
CDI commonly supports both customer relationship management and master data management, and enables access from these enterprise applications to information confidently describing everything known about a customer, donor, or prospect, including all attributes and cross references, along with the critical definition and identification necessary to uniquely differentiate one customer from another and their individual needs.