WHAT IS A CUSTOMER DATA WAREHOUSE?

Customer-Centricity in Doing and Analyzing Business

A customer data warehouse--a data warehouse designed to support the customer-centric analysis of your business–is a critical component in your becoming a customer centric organization.

In the closed loop cycle of operations and analysis, where operations is the set of activities that you perform to do business and analysis is the set of activities that you perform to understand and refine your business in order to make operations more efficient and/or effective, a data warehouse provides the foundation for the analysis activities. It should contain the data that represents the results of doing business. Its applications help you understand those results, and their results refine and improve your operations. In the closed-loop cycle of customer-centric operations and analysis, a customer data warehouse is the key enabler of customer-centric analyses. What differentiates customer-centric operations and analyses and a customer data warehouse is the customer perspective, taking the customer’s point of view.

A customer perspective is the key to stronger customer relationships, and, as we’ve stated many times, stronger customer relationships mean greater profits.

How to Be Customer-Centric

We’ve been advocating customer-centricity for many years. In Customers.com, her landmark 1998 book, Patty Seybold identified and described the axioms for customer-centricity. They were on point then, and they’ve stood the test of time.

* Make it easy for your customers to do business with you

* Focus on your customers for your products and services

* Redesign your customer-facing business processes from the customer’s point of view

* Foster customer loyalty, the key to profitability

Our advocacy for customer centricity (perhaps evangelism is a better term) has been focused primarily on your operations--the applications that touch, face, and support your customers and the channels through which they interact with you. Through our Customer Scenario® Mapping methodology, we’ve helped hundreds of organizations transform their businesses from being internally focused on business processes to becoming externally focused on their customers, showing them, visually and interactively, how to redesign their business from their customers’ point of view.

Research in Customer-Centric Analysis

We’ve begun work in the area of customer-centric analysis. Two years ago, we published research on customer-centric analytic applications. These are products that analyze customer relationships, and the results of their usage can be used to refine your operations. They require a data warehouse for their input and much of their output, but we just assumed their presence. We never analyzed data warehouse content, structure, or management.

This year, we’ve done research on data warehouse databases. We’ve evaluated and compared the products that you should consider for your customer data warehouse from features and functions, architecture, and viability perspectives.

Looking back at this research, what we’ve found in examining these products and technologies and in talking to the organizations that use them is that analysis is frequently performed from an internal perspective. Customer-centric analytic applications don’t always take a customer perspective, and data warehouses are more focused on internal products, sales, and service data than on customers. For example, we’ve reviewed several analytic applications for call centers. These products provide excellent analysis of the efficiency of your call centers and their staffs, but that analysis focuses on the internal utilization efficiency of call distribution and call handling. We learned about the key metric AHT, average (call) handle time, and the objective to minimize its value. Minimum AHT can be great for call center efficiency, but it’s not always great for customer satisfaction. Average case close time, the time to satisfy a request, is a customer-centric call center metric.

It’s time to become as customer-centric in analysis as you’re becoming in your operations. A customer data warehouse is the place to start. You need a customer data warehouse to do customer-centric analysis. And, you need to do customer-centric analysis to close the loop and become a completely customer-centric organization...