Creating a consolidated database for a 360-degree customer view

Markets today are highly dynamic and fiercely competitive. A targeted customer approach with sustainable customer loyalty is decisive for competition. But this is precisely where companies very often fail. Because they lack a holistic view of each individual customer and business partner. This requires a reliable, consolidated and, above all, central customer base for 360 degree customer view. And this is what many companies struggle with.
 

Do you know your customers? Benchmark Auntie Emma.

In earlier times, as some of us may still remember, people bought practically all their goods at the corner store. People knew Auntie Emma, the owner knew her customers in detail. And they took advantage of this knowledge, for example, by addressing customers by name, by making purchases in advance, or perhaps by recommending products. It was also easy to have a 'letter written' as an early form of sales financing.

Sure, the number of customers and business partners of Auntie Emma was manageable. But at least she remembered everything although she didn't have a computer. Companies in the digital, globalized economy, on the other hand, have to deal with an atomistic market structure and sometimes have to process millions of master data records. But it's all about transferring the basic mechanisms of Auntie Emma as a benchmark into a scalable process model.
 

Uniform, complete and up-to-date 360 degree view of all customer data across all touchpoints as the basis for sales and marketing activities

Auntie Emma extracted valuable knowledge from the data consolidated in her mind and applied it to each individual customer. Transferred to today, this means using a holistic approach to customer data management to create the conditions for a uniform, complete, and up-to-date view of all customer data, across all touchpoints and interactions. After all, companies must master the challenge of keeping the focus on the individual customer in digital mass markets - in the style of Auntie Emma.

Based on a consolidated 360 degree view, activities such as sales and marketing become transparent, controllable and manageable, and thus successful. Companies achieve two things above all:
 

1. Exploit value creation potential from the company asset 'customer data'.
2. Make software, organization, and internal processes more agile to roll out new products and services based on customer data faster.