If you were at the 2009 Customer Reference Forum in Berkeley, you had a chance to see the presentation from Becky Roberts of Genesys entitled: Taming the Reference Data Beast: How Genesys Took On The Monster..and Won.

We were fortunate enough to ride shotgun on Becky’s adventure into the data unknown involving the standardization, clean up, and consolidation of 5 separate data sources. She did a particularly good job of marshalling all the resources needed internally at Genesys and gaining management support of the project.

The end result is a very clean, well-structured customer reference database that many inside Genesys now consider to be the most accurate system of record for the data involved. Better yet, for Sales, all customer reference functionality is accessible from within Salesforce.com, which will really help with user adoption.

For more of the story, read Bill Lee’s pre-conference interview with Becky