The virtual shortcut

• Article 4 of 6
• Database Marketing, October 2005
• View a PDF of the original article ~ 1.9MB

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The single customer view is a vital step on the way to effective marketing. A cleaned, de-duped view of all customer data and transactions provides benefits to both the marketer and the customer: better targeting and less waste during marketing campaigns; better analysis of customer behaviour and trends; and better customer service.

But achieving a single view is by no means easy. Data is often spread throughout a company in various databases, flat files and other sources. Some way has to be found to aggregate the data from these sources. Most companies opt for the traditional approach of ETL, extracting data at regular intervals from the databases, transforming it using a set of pre-established rules, before loading the cleaned data into a central repository where it’s merged with the other sources.

Yet some prefer a ‘virtual’ single customer view, extracting information from the different datasets, transforming it and merging it on the fly, arguing there are many advantages to it, including a real-time view of customers that is completely up to date. So is the single virtual view a viable option for marketing?

Bill Marjot, CMO of SmartFocus, says while he doesn’t think one approach is categorically better than the other, “if you can leave the data where it is – and there are very good reasons for doing that – it reduces the time necessary to deploy a solution and get marketing up and running. If you can do that, it’s very good news.”

It’s a viewpoint Steve Clarke of CDMS backs up, saying that with the virtual view system from Unica that his company resells, he can get companies putting together campaigns within eight weeks – “a lot of that is meetings, working out matching rules and making sure you provide exactly what the client wants. We can get it done in days.”

Done correctly, a virtual view will be identical to a single integrated database in capabilities. Marketers will be able to extract data from the view for analysis and campaigns, since single-view systems invariably can export into XML and other standard data formats. So for certain applications, virtual and consolidated approaches will produce similar results.

In fact, there will be some situations where the virtual view might be the only one possible. In many organisations, data intended for use in the single customer view is often contained in legacy systems or operational systems, such as accounts, call centres and ERP systems. Often it will be impossible to centralise the data from these systems; this might be because of technological shortcomings in the various systems, internal politics or legal issues, such as data protection restrictions. It may even be a deliberate security policy designed to stop a hacker that breaks into one database from having access to all customer data instantaneously.

Tim Pottinger, CRM divisional managing director of Identex, highlights for example, the problems of merged companies. “They can [combine datasets], provided they ask the right question, but often they haven’t got control over all their datasets, their partners and legacy systems. It’s a big project which may need more structural types of changes.”

Combining the different datasets into a virtual view is not a trivial operation. To link the databases and present this view will require a unique key that allows the systems to match the records in the different databases. This may be a customer number or similar ID. But where datasets refer to different products or have been acquired through merger and acquisition, for example, there may be no such ID.

In these cases, some kind of matching algorithm or tool will be needed, typically based on name, address and other data – or whatever data happens to be available in the source databases. Once the company has matched the equivalent records, tagging them with corresponding IDs for future matching will reduce overheads and matching time. It may not be possible to do this however, because of write restrictions in some databases, meaning that matching will need to be done on the fly in the virtual view.

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