SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW FEATURE

Keeping it real

Real-time updating of customer-referenced data is the dream of many marketers, but achieving it can be exceptionally difficult and expensive, and do you really need to have all your data up to date all the time, asks James Lawson?

“Absolute real time should mean a customer entering data on the web and it immediately being made available to every part of the business.”

Jeremy Jones, Marketing Director, Datanomic,

I

f a customer buys a product, how long will it be before the marketing department knows about it? And how long before they can use that data operationally? Companies like Dataflux and Informatica have long offered products to enable the “real-time” single customer view while Oracle’s purchase of GoldenGate last year shows how important real- time updating is in many database and data warehousing applications. This sounds great for marketers: all the

customer-referenced data you need and bang up to date every time you want it. But real-time updating is no trivial technical matter. It’s big, expensive and complicated, all the things that IT vendors dream of when winning a project bid.

www.dmarket.co.uk

So, do you really want all your customer data freshly laundered?

WHAT IS IT?

“Absolute real time should mean a customer entering data on the web and it immediately being made available to every part of the business,” says Jeremy Jones, Marketing Director at Datanomic. “You want to be able to go to a telecoms store, go online or call their call centre and be able to get the same up-to-date figure for your minutes allowance in each one.” Like all fashionable phrases, “real time” is overused – and abused – by vendors to cover everything from automatic emails triggered by website actions to single manual postcode look- ups. Here, it means real-time database updating as opposed to marketing or other actions performed immediately in response to some stimulus, though the latter often requires the former. More precisely, it’s about updating customer-related data in a single customer view (SCV) used by customer applications within seconds of a change taking place in a source system. That might mean adding a purchase to a transaction record or noting a complaint as part of a customer history accessible by call centre

agents. ááá

Real time or nearly?

An example of a real-time customer view is Smart Computing, an XML parsing solution written in Microsoft’s BizTalk that accesses operational data feeds in flow and cuts specific data so the parent system can store the operational data required for day-to-day business operations. A separate process takes the extracted data en route to the data store and works it into insightful data or diverts to a purpose specific solution or system in a ready to use format.

An application of this technology might be in a customer service environment, taking customer interaction data and publishing or replicating this data into marketing and web systems that operate in isolation of the service CRM tools, such as address changes, triggering next best actions and wider business processes such as confirmation of name and address letters. Whilst scalable, this solution has many functional rivals of varying size and scale such as TIBCO and J2EE to name a few. This might manifest itself in fraud detection or virus protection applications.

Near-real-time on the other hand might be a mirrored data solution, which frequently switches the visible view of a database to enable publishing of the most recent information according to a schedule. This can provide stability or disaster recovery benefits if designed properly, whilst also meeting the needs of operational, risk management or marketing decisioning systems.

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