Complete Customer Profiling Remains ElusiveComplete Customer Profiling Remains Elusive

A 360-degree view of the customer is so tantalizing that most companies are virtually drooling over the prospect of being able to sell, service, market, cross-sell, and up-sell from a common view of a customer's history. The 360-degree view makes all the sense in the world: It treats the customer more as a living, breathing entity rather than as disparate sets of loosely related data records. And it recognizes how customer interactions affect just about every part of a company, from sales and marketing to manufacturing and production to delivery and support.

The problem is how to get there. As simple as the idea sounds, achieving a complete customer view has proved as elusive as the search for the Holy Grail. The holdup: integration. In a Meta Group study on Customer Data Integration, business-technology professionals say the greatest issue in customer-information management is the variety of data sources from which they must pull information.

Customer data sits all over the place. It's on secure servers accessible only through password-protected applications. It's in sales histories stored in relational databases and in E-mail, Word documents, and other unstructured information silos. It's on desktop and laptop hard drives. Increasingly, it's even on the mobile devices used by field personnel. No wonder the top data-quality issue cited by Meta Group is the completeness of customer data. When the information is scattered in various locations and formats, how can anyone hope to get a complete picture of the customer?

Unfortunately, it's not a situation that's going to get simpler soon. Companies plan to capture more detailed customer data this year than they did last year, according to Meta Group's research, creating growing pools of information that make the integration task that much more daunting.

What's your company doing to achieve a 360-degree view of its customers? Let us know at the address below.

Tony Kontzer
Senior Editor
[email protected]

Data Hurdles

What are your company's top customer-data-quality issues?

Business-technology managers have a clear picture of what's driving demand for tools to integrate customer data: the need for speed, improved process automation, supply-chain optimization, and collaboration. Market offerings for these tools are maturing. Meta Group's survey indicates that just two years after their introduction, companies anticipate next-generation technologies can bring unstructured information together, helping alleviate data issues.