InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
September 20, 1999
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"We're trying to transform ourselves from a place our customers go to physically, to more of a Web destination," Weider says. For that, Trinity needs brand recognition with the elderly. The health center plans to offer Web training courses and even create an Internet service provider for seniors, because of the potential payback. "You can have the world's greatest Web site, but the community needs to accept it as a means of accessing information," Weider says. By providing focused information on the Web-such as diets and treatments for diabetes and the names of doctors-Trinity hopes seniors will pick one of its three hospitals for diagnostic work or acute care.
The next step in putting customer data to work at Trinity is finding products for its data warehouse that do exception reporting and alerts via E-mail. Weider wants to analyze data from physicians and hopes to find trend-tracking tools that can spot periodic drops in the number of patients a doctor admits, he says, to identify potential problem areas.
Kiosk Commerce
Staples will offer LAN equipment, telephony packages, and even 401(k) financial services through four Web-equipped kiosks in each of its roughly 800 stores across the United States. After that, it has plans to expand the effort internationally, says Staples CIO Brian Light. Consumers who order through store kiosks today pay for their purchases at a conventional checkout counter. But Light envisions future buyers paying directly at the kiosks, eliminating the need for sales associates at cash registers. He has other business innovations planned as well. "We need to expand the way customers get products from Staples, which might result in ordering from a Palm Pilot or a radio-frequency device that would let you walk down the aisles, scan the products, and check out," he says.
To reach its lofty goals, Staples needs to go back to the onerous basics: segmenting its databases, cleansing the customer data it takes in from multiple sources, and coordinating its offerings across all its channels, including stores and the Web. As others undergoing the process have found, that's no small task. "Our challenge for the next year is understanding the organizational implications of how our marketing organization works," Light says. "We have to move from a business-unit approach to a marketing-centric approach."
Most companies these days pay lip service to customer primacy, and even invest in software and services to support it. But without a data overhaul, they can still fail to deliver on their promises.
At Sears, Roebuck and Co., customer data quality is key to efforts to increase cross-selling opportunities among multiple businesses, including retail, home services, credit, specialty catalog, and E-commerce operations. The problem? Each business has its own IT system, making it impossible for Sears to develop one single customer list.
Sears is developing a data warehouse that initially will include data on its credit and home service customers-237 million individual customer records totaling 4 terabytes to 5 terabytes of data. But because those data sets might have erroneous ZIP codes or phone numbers or may record addresses in different formats, Sears is using Vality's Integrity 3.0 to cleanse the data-correcting errors and putting data in a consistent format.
Once you've got high-quality customer data, how do you put it to work for you? Will Weider, CIO at Trinity Regional Health Center in Rock Island, Ill., will spend up to $1 million to answer that question. His hope is that he can use the high-quality patient data in his 45-Gbyte data warehouse to target the elderly, who account for roughly 70% of his group's annual revenue.
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While Trinity is focusing largely on expanding the marketplace for its current services, retailers such as $700 million office-supply vendor Staples Inc. is moving quickly to offer customers a greater number of products and services on the Web.
The company's robust Web site already lets consumers order via the Internet. And Staples last year acquired an office-products catalog sales firm, Quill, that has helped it create online catalogs aimed at specific industries. By tracking the purchasing habits of these customers, Staples hopes to identify what products they should be buying, and to suggest additional products via E-mail to "achieve a bigger share of wallet," Light says.
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