Channel’s customers or Customer’s channels?
Do customers belong to channels or are channels created for customers ?
The good news is that a lot of enterprises are now thinking hard to make sure that they have a single view of all their customers. For that to be possible, they need to take the customers out of the channels that they are locked up in. The user profile needs to be a service that needs to be hosted centrally but shared across the enterprise. Each of the channels should be a consumer of the service, when it is about obtaining customer information and also should be responsible enough to update customer information back to the service when it receives new information from the customer. It is also important to understand what all information would make up the unified profile. A customer profile would contain the following basic information areas - identity information, demographic information, domain specific preferences and transactional history. While the ideal Unified profile would contain all of this, it will not be practical to start creating such a service in any enterprise of reasonable size, due to issues with data ownership, security and technology limitations. A feasible approach may be to start creating a central, unified user repository which at least holds identity and demographic information. Since the success of such an initiative is equally dependent on organizational politics and technology, small but sure steps may be a better bet. I am hoping that most of the large retailers would succeed in doing something similar soon – because we customers also stand to gain a lot when they have channels created around us than being locked up inside a channel.
