360° View of a Customer

As companies grow, they need to focus on maintaining good customer relationships to drive bottom line performance. Often, end-users are frustrated when they try to get a complete view of their customers. Why? Because data is often kept in individual silos, only serving the needs of the department that needs that information. To truly understand not only the relationship – but the behavior – of a customer, companies need to develop a comprehensive, 360 degree view of each customer. Companies that have successfully developed this capability can decide which customers to pursue, which to grow and most importantly, which customers will have a negative impact on corporate performance. Core questions to answer include:

• Which customers have which products?
• What is the profit potential for each customer?
• What new products fit different customer demographic segments?
• How can you use your existing customers to get new customers?

A customer is more than the number of products and services they have purchased from you. What is driving their behavior? How did their personal situation affect their buying behavior? Without the answers to these questions, it’s no wonder that most companies have average or below average results.

In today’s fast moving economy, information about prospects and customers is everywhere. The Internet has provided a remarkable search mechanism for research – and data – about potential and existing customers. If you have business customers, you should know the credit worthiness of each customer and any potential obligations or litigation that may affect your business relationship. If you serve retail customers, you’ll want to know as much as you can about the first time a customer buys from you so you can determine if a long-term relationship is warranted. Something as simple as zip code information may give you enough demographic data to make such a decision.

So why aren’t more companies proficient at having this view? Because in order to get a 360 degree view, you need to bring together information from multiple sources and systems – sources and systems that may store data differently and most likely have different, but similar definitions of things like “customer name” or “ship to” address. Reconciling customer data can be maddening, but it’s not impossible.

First, you need to establish a common set of definitions. Then, you have to have a governance process to ensure your data is complete and up to date. Next, end-users need access to the information in the context of the way you operate your business, whether you are organized by geography or product line. Finally, changing your structure shouldn’t mean you have to rebuild your data – making changes should be easy to manage and deploy across the organization.

Using Kalido, companies can deliver timely, accurate and complete views of their customers, products and locations performance across the entire organization. Kalido validates, maps and stores disparate customer data from multiple sources so it can be used by BI tools to deliver a single view of customer data. As companies reorganize, acquire new companies and launch new offerings, Kalido’s unique business modeling allows organizations to keep pace with all of the new changes, while perfectly preserving all historical data so the information is always timely and accurate. New views of customers, products and locations are delivered overnight, versus the months that it can take with other solutions.