KDD Nuggets Index

Recently I attended a meeting of information systems
professionals in the telecommunications industry. What a tough job.

The industry is undergoing intense competition from upstarts who
aren't encumbered by legacy systems and legacy policies. The systems
are large, complex and hard to change. The interfaces between the
order-taking systems and the operational systems are hard-coded and
based on 20-year-old industry specifications.

Meanwhile, the business executives are tearing out their hair
because they need much tighter relationships with their customers the
customers whose data is locked in to these hard-coded applications
before those customers are stolen away by the competition. The
business executives also need to be able to design and launch new
products and services in weeks, not months.

Does this sound familiar? Banking, energy, utility,
pharmaceutical and other industries are facing similar scenarios.

The simple answer, you might say, is to build a data warehouse to
pull all the customer-related information in to one logical
place. Then, create a SWAT team with rapid application development
(RAD) tools to prototype, design and roll out applications for new
products and services.

Wrong! Eventually, you'll probably need to do both of those
things, but they won't solve the main problem or let you get the
well-deserved rest and recreation you crave.

What you need is a new platform for integrated customer
interactions. Replace your outmoded order-taking systems with
state-of-the-art customer-interaction applications. Customers should
be able to sign up for your products and services by calling your
toll-free telephone number (as they probably do now) or by following
the prompts on a voice-response system. Or, they should be able to
jump on the Internet to request information, order services, call up
their bill and pay it, review their profile of services and change
some of them.

Furthermore, you want every employee from the salespeople and
technicians in the field to the vice president of marketing to have
access to an integrated picture of the firm's interactions with your
customers. The applications they use to do their jobs should be
integrated with the customer-interaction platform.

This is quite different from a conventional data warehouse. A
data warehouse consolidates information stored in legacy applications,
refines it and puts it in understandable form for analysis. What I'm
talking about here is a dynamic suite of applications with real-time
information. These are the systems you use to serve customers, to
cement and strengthen customer loyalty and to discern patterns so that
you can create popular new programs and services.

The system should provide a 360-degree view of customers and
their interactions with your firm. The integrated suite of
applications will handle everything from billing to field sales, from
help desk support to enabling customers to help themselves to
information and services.

You can start with one of the many off-the-shelf packages for
integrated customer care and tailor it to your business. Or, you can
build it yourself, knocking off one application at a time.

Yes, you'll want to have a data warehouse full of relevant
information about your customer accounts. Yes, you'll want a RAD SWAT
team to develop and deploy applications for new product rollouts. But
do all of this in the context of an integrated customer-interaction
platform. That's how you become a hero and get to enjoy that
well-deserved vacation.