Requirements for a Customer Context

The Customer Context complies with the following business requirements:

• Consistent

  • Regardless of what channel has been chosen for the Customer Conversation, the information available to the customer-facing application has to be exactly the same. This is particularly important if multiple vendors support the touchpoints/channels.
  • Customers expect to be treated the same at each touchpoint.
  • Companies cannot afford to let customer play one channel against the other.

• Current

  • Inbound Customer Conversations require the customer information not only to be up-to-date, but up-to-the-minute current.
  • Customers switching touchpoints, for example doing a web search first and than calling a customer service agent, because they cannot find what they are looking for, require quick updates between touchpoint applications, potentially from different vendors.

• Complete

  • Having only partial customer information available at a touchpoint can result in an unpleasant customer experience.
  • Firms are at risk of losing high value customers if they serve them through touchpoints with incomplete information, not aware of the full context of their relationship with that customer.

• Consolidated

  • All customer information for a given customer has to be assembled together in one place. Every customer data fragment has to be identified and associated with an individual.
  • Treating one individual as two and sending out promotions twice usually results in near-zero acceptance rates.
  • Treating a valuable long-time customer as a newcomer may result in loosing the customer altogether. This can happen if a campaign has been based on an unconsolidated piece of customer data from the person.

The Customer Context contains historic information as well as up-to-the minute current data. Only the combination of non-aggregated actual data with historic information gives customer-facing applications the ability to respond to unexpected requests by the customer.