Customer Data Integration or CDI is regarded as the process of combining customer information from various customer data resources, of an organization. The information resources may vary company to company like shipping process information, sales process information, service process information and bookkeeping process information. Customer data integration is a complex tasks made easy by advanced customer data integration systems.

Customer data integration involves a collection of technologies and processes to track, store and share customer data. The major application of customer data integration procedures are in customer relationship management (CRM). CDI provides timely, complete and accurate analytics and reports that help an enterprise to enhance its CRM practices. The basic step in the customer data integration, the business automation, makes a company more flexible, faster and reliable.

The specific software programs of the customer relationship management solutions are CRM based software programs. These software programs help a CDI solution to identify each customer individually. These software programs track particular customer's preferences, activities, transactions, number of visits, contact details etc. CDI systems provide accurate reports about each customer, and help in finding good customers. This feature helps the companies to understand each customer individually and design customized plans for each of them.

The major technologies followed by today's customer data integration systems are Enterprise Information Integration (EII), Extract-Transform-Load (ETL) and Data Quality (DQ) tools. ETL technology enables a system to transfer large volumes of data in batch-mode. EII help in the sharing of queries among various devices. And DQ tools are responsible for tracking information resources. A range of other advanced technologies are also used to increase the modularity of the CDI systems.

The advantages of using customer data integration solutions over manual solutions include:
1.Fully automated business procedure.
2.Better customer contact management and lead management.
3.Specific customer database management.
4.Enhancement in specific marketing programs like direct marketing and e-mail marketing.
5.Easy sales tracking.
6.Elimination of duplicate and false data entry.
7.Time savings by automated processes.
8.Easy access to all data resources.

CDI solutions also help in budget preparing, trouble shooting and activity management processes.

The popular options with customer data integration solutions are open source CDI software systems and hosted or on demand CDI services. Open source CDI solutions come in standard formats and permit you to customize them according to your business needs. Thus these systems allow you to stay flexible with your business strategy in the changing business environment. Today there are many CDI software vendors, often CRM software vendors, offering open source or pre-customized CDI software solutions. The thing to be remembered when purchasing is making sure that company has enough technical assistance to customize the software.

Hosted or on demand CDI solutions are web-based customer data integration service provided by a CDI provider. This is one example of Software as a Service or SaaS. There are many on-demand CRM service providers who offer all types of customer data integration services, who provide you CDI services for a low monthly fee. The benefits of on demand CDI services include global access, elimination of maintenance cost, relief from mental pressure and reduction in enterprise working capital. Recently one another alternative known as open source hosted CDI service, which combines the merits of both solutions, is becoming rapidly popular.