How to effectively use a customer database?
15 February 2008
Read by 6563 persons
This question leads to many others! Success depends on various organizational, technological, and especially human aspects, and it is impossible not to discuss the database creation methodology.
It is necessary to analyze the company's needs and objectives, including:
• formalizing processes,
• changing habits and training users and management,
• necessary technological integration and "digestion."
So, what are the objectives for this database? For what uses? For which users? With what information? What methods for collecting and updating information? What tools to use it? What processes should the database support? What control indicators? etc.
As many questions as there are clients and users. Yet, it is in the initial analysis and the questions—more than the answers—that success or failure in the database creation and operation process can be determined.
What objectives for what use?
Objectives are essential for determining the means, content, and especially the control elements that allow for adjustments.
Without objectives, there is no measurement and therefore difficulties in validating the proper use of the database and motivating the "troops"!
Is the database intended for:
• Sales representatives to reduce the sales cycle? Reduce the quotation phase? Memorize events for better customer knowledge? etc.
• Marketers to reduce campaign implementation? Refine target populations through additional criteria and scores—data scanning, data mining? Automate stages in campaigns—workflow? Better analyze returns? etc.
• Customer support? To better manage multi-channel relationships? Respond faster? More easily prepare a response? etc.
• Management? For relevant decision-making analyses? etc.
In all cases, one of the primary objectives is user benefit. A database is correctly used if the user finds it useful! They use it not because it's imposed but because it improves and simplifies their daily tasks…
Attention to rigor…
Any computerization exercise is structuring and cannot rely on poorly defined processes. Many difficulties in operating a database are due to the lack of formalization of internal tasks: within the same team, work methods often differ from one person to another… It is therefore impossible to satisfy users if the software "imposes" a way of working that has not been validated by the entire team.
An obsession: collection and updating
The very difficulty of a database is its feeding and updating. This question must be asked for each piece of information that one wishes to insert into the database:
• what use?
• what collection method/cost?
• what update method/cost?
Since users are the primary stakeholders, it is imperative to respect their interests in a collection/update request and to motivate its usefulness… for them!
How many companies ask their sales representatives to enter SIRET numbers—13 digits!—for prospects and clients… This potentially useful information is unknown to the sales representative; asking them to enter it when creating a file creates a barrier to using the system.
It is the daily and voluntary use by teams that makes the data rich.
However, one-off interactive or batch processing—Data Quality Management—also allows for corrections and enhancements to ensure the relevance of the database and combat its natural obsolescence mechanism.
Today's technologies allow for better user assistance in checking for duplicates, checking and automatically correcting addresses—RNVP, enrichment with phone numbers, SIRET numbers, file upload—pop-up screen, which avoids entering contact details.
Similarly, technological advances make it easier to upload till receipts and thus create behavioral databases.
Technology at the service of the user…
Technology is a tool that serves the user! And if a learning phase is necessary, the user must then be more efficient thanks to the database, and the company must have a certain autonomy regarding the inevitable evolutions that the database and associated tools may undergo, in a continuous improvement approach for processes, people, and tools.
A finality: decision and action
The database is now at the heart of the company's main processes, and if the objectives are clearly defined and associated with dashboards, it will be easy to judge its proper use.
But it must be part of the virtuous cycle that feeds itself: "information—decision—action"!
Thierry ALINGRIN
Posted on March 16, 2009
amabis.com
It is necessary to analyze the company's needs and objectives, including:
• formalizing processes,
• changing habits and training users and management,
• necessary technological integration and "digestion."
So, what are the objectives for this database? For what uses? For which users? With what information? What methods for collecting and updating information? What tools to use it? What processes should the database support? What control indicators? etc.
As many questions as there are clients and users. Yet, it is in the initial analysis and the questions—more than the answers—that success or failure in the database creation and operation process can be determined.
What objectives for what use?
Objectives are essential for determining the means, content, and especially the control elements that allow for adjustments.
Without objectives, there is no measurement and therefore difficulties in validating the proper use of the database and motivating the "troops"!
Is the database intended for:
• Sales representatives to reduce the sales cycle? Reduce the quotation phase? Memorize events for better customer knowledge? etc.
• Marketers to reduce campaign implementation? Refine target populations through additional criteria and scores—data scanning, data mining? Automate stages in campaigns—workflow? Better analyze returns? etc.
• Customer support? To better manage multi-channel relationships? Respond faster? More easily prepare a response? etc.
• Management? For relevant decision-making analyses? etc.
In all cases, one of the primary objectives is user benefit. A database is correctly used if the user finds it useful! They use it not because it's imposed but because it improves and simplifies their daily tasks…
Attention to rigor…
Any computerization exercise is structuring and cannot rely on poorly defined processes. Many difficulties in operating a database are due to the lack of formalization of internal tasks: within the same team, work methods often differ from one person to another… It is therefore impossible to satisfy users if the software "imposes" a way of working that has not been validated by the entire team.
An obsession: collection and updating
The very difficulty of a database is its feeding and updating. This question must be asked for each piece of information that one wishes to insert into the database:
• what use?
• what collection method/cost?
• what update method/cost?
Since users are the primary stakeholders, it is imperative to respect their interests in a collection/update request and to motivate its usefulness… for them!
How many companies ask their sales representatives to enter SIRET numbers—13 digits!—for prospects and clients… This potentially useful information is unknown to the sales representative; asking them to enter it when creating a file creates a barrier to using the system.
It is the daily and voluntary use by teams that makes the data rich.
However, one-off interactive or batch processing—Data Quality Management—also allows for corrections and enhancements to ensure the relevance of the database and combat its natural obsolescence mechanism.
Today's technologies allow for better user assistance in checking for duplicates, checking and automatically correcting addresses—RNVP, enrichment with phone numbers, SIRET numbers, file upload—pop-up screen, which avoids entering contact details.
Similarly, technological advances make it easier to upload till receipts and thus create behavioral databases.
Technology at the service of the user…
Technology is a tool that serves the user! And if a learning phase is necessary, the user must then be more efficient thanks to the database, and the company must have a certain autonomy regarding the inevitable evolutions that the database and associated tools may undergo, in a continuous improvement approach for processes, people, and tools.
A finality: decision and action
The database is now at the heart of the company's main processes, and if the objectives are clearly defined and associated with dashboards, it will be easy to judge its proper use.
But it must be part of the virtuous cycle that feeds itself: "information—decision—action"!
Thierry ALINGRIN
Posted on March 16, 2009
amabis.com
