17. April 2008 by Rick Abbott.

What is a 360° View of the Customer, and why is it important?  First we’ll talk about the benefits of painting a complete picture of your customer, and then we’ll talk about how to go about making this happen.

The benefits of a customer centric approach can be organized along the lines of customer acquisition and expansion, customer retention, and operational efficiency. 

Customer acquisition and expansion are generally the domain of marketing and sales working in tandem.  The benefits to marketing revolve primarily around the ability to segment customers into groups to allow them to tailor their messages.  Using information such as current products and services, past purchase history, financial and other attributes, marketing can target the most profitable customers and even exclude customers that are likely to be unprofitable.  Sales is generally more interested in having all the information for a single customer at their finger tips.  This helps them plan out their sales calls, pull together proposals and bids, and respond to customer inquiries.

Customer retention should be a joint effort between customer service, marketing, and sales.  But it often falls into the lap of customer service, who like sales is usually most interested in having all information for a particular customer.  They primarily use this in a reactive mode, while fielding calls from customers wanting to change service or resolve a problem.  However, one of the primary benefits to a complete customer view is the ability to be proactive by linking events to a particular customer, and even tailoring the level of response based on the status level of the customer (e.g., Gold level customers get priority).

Operational efficiency is usually the purview of the finance group, although all functional areas are impacted, particularly when budget cutting time rolls around.  Finance is most interested in profitability and other monetary metrics around the customer, usually at a segment level or across the entire customer base.  This information can be used to drive business expansion plans, advise marketing and sales on high value customer segments, and provide management insights into the overall health of the business via trending.

The technical solution revolves around the key data elements that make up your customer profile, such as contact information, transaction, financial, and interaction data.  There are a number of tools (e.g., Siperian Hub) available today that are marketed under the category of “Customer Data Integration”.  These tools provide a common data model, data cleansing, integration, change management and other related capabilities.  You can also use more general purpose tools such as Enterprise Information Integration (EII) or Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools to integrate the data, either virtually or explicitly.  But be careful of the vendor promise to deliver this on a platter.  The critical effort will be determining the high-value benefits and engaging the business in crafting the solution.

For a more detailed discussion on this subject, download my white paper 360 Degree Customer View. 

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17. April 2008 by Rick Abbott.

I just finished reading the Information Week IN DEPTH article on Business Intelligence, which focused on the big 4 BI vendors, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

The article provides a nice overview of their respective BI capabilities, with the focus on their recent acquisitions and efforts to integrate these products into their BI offerings.   The author provides a summary of next steps for each vendor product, and pros and cons for each platform. One piece of information she failed to provide was an overview of their specific product offerings, which I’ve filled in with the attached report from my FullView vendor database (360DegreeView Research).

In general I agree with the author’s summarization of the 4 vendor’s product suites.  Her bottom line is that customers should benefit from tighter integration between the various acquired products, for instance IBM integrating the Cognos with the DB2 database platform.   And she correctly points out that the biggest bang will be in tighter integration between business intelligence and data integration tools with enterprise applications such as SAP and Siebel. 

While this is a boon to those companies that have gone to a one vendor enterprise solution, I feel that this could be an issue with the majority of buyers with a heterogeneous environment.  This goes beyond the obvious question of cross-company product support (e.g., Cognos, recently acquired by IBM, on an Oracle 11 database).  The bigger question in my mind is the future investments in these various acquired products, with the inevitable pull towards making investments in integration versus innovation of the product itself.  It also raises the question of who will pay for this increased integration, and will this impact the cost to those customers buying the standalone product.

Bottom line, I think these integrated product suites will be a viable option for Fortune 500 customers, but I feel this will prove a boon to open source and best of breed point solutions.

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17. April 2008 by Rick Abbott.

My name is Rick Abbott.  This blog will focus on business intelligence, data warehouse, data integration and related topics.  The blog is complementary to my corporate website at www.360degreeview.com.

Below is my bio, if you’d like additional information please send me a note.

Rick Abbott is President of 360DegreeView, LLC.  
He has over 19 years of information management and technology experience, including private and public sector work.  On the commercial side, he has significant experience in both the Telecommunications and Financial Services industries.  He has over 8 years of “Big 5″ experience, including an associate partnership position with Deloitte Consulting.
His primary focus over the past 11 years has been on large-scale business intelligence initiatives.  He has direct experience in all aspects of business intelligence and data warehouse projects, including business case development, strategic planning and business alignment, business requirements, and technical architecture and design.  He possesses over 10 years of large IT related project management experience.
He also has significant experience in assisting clients in negotiating large technology product, service, and outsourcing contracts.
Rick can be reached at rick@360degreeview.com.

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