Single view of the customer

http://marketingroi.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/debunking-marketing-myths-single-view-of-a-customer/trackback/

Ron Shevlin, on his ‘Marketing Whims’ blog, blogged about single view of a customer being a ‘marketing myth’.  ‘

Ron - My take: Truth is, most companies don’t know what a single view of the customer is, and many place way too much value in the concept.

Looking at it from a pure marketing point of view, I’d say ‘maybe’. I think Ron focuses in his article a bit too much on the data rather than the applications of that data.

It would be foolish to give a CSR access to every data element available, as Ron suggests, but having all that information ready to provide the CSR with the appropriate action to take is a much better way of doing it. (It still relies on having somewhere near to a single view of the customer. At least, it absolutely requires a single record for each customer, even if the integration of all systems is not included. ) If there is a way of measuring the the results of the decision made then even better – so this can be fed back into the analytic model that provided the action to take in the first place.

 Also, there are non-marketing requirements for a single view of the customer- in the sales to delivery process, pretty much everywhere in a bank, especially in investment banks between the front, middle and back offices. Within these processes are very strong arguments for the development and maintenance of a single view of the customer in most organisations.

Using BI to gain a competitive edge

This was in response to a post on linkedin  regarding the usage of business intelligence.

Traditional business intelligence on its own is nice. It lets you know what you have done as a business, and a little bit on where you could be doing in the future. I 100% agree with the other posters about MDM/governance and stewardship as essential enablers to efficent BI by the way. As other posters have intimated, this can be of significant value in making decisons.

However, how much impact these decisions have on the bottom line cannot often be measured, particularly within the typical ‘reporting tool’ environment that is normally seen in conjunction with business intelligence. These decisions are also typically tactical – which company to sell to – or strategic – which market to enter, which is only a small part of the scope of decisions made in the organisation.

 To make the most of the information and analytics you have to hand, operational intelligence and operational decision making needs to be integrated to either automate or suggest the decisions made by customer-facing people, and crucially record the effectiveness of this decision so that the model/parameters it is made based on can be adjusted. Without this closing of the loop and the positive feedback, the power of the information in the organisation (and outside) isn’t being used valuably.

Suggest you have a look at James Taylor on the website attached who is evangelistic about this sort of stuff. Links: http://www.smartenoughsystems.com