Marketing knowledge databases
Because Customer Knowledge consists of material that is both unstructured and open end and structured information, such as data from surveys, the form of a customer knowledge database has to allow for flexibility together with a wide variety of access and dissemination. Our Notanant Marketing Knowledge System has been developed to meet the challenge of these Customer Knowledge databases.
To understand more of the complexity of customer and competitor knowledge and why it is difficult for conventional database ideas to be applied, see our article on collecting market intelligence.
Most databases are typically fairly rigid in terms of the data and tables they require. However, a customer knowledge database has to be capable of holding data in a wide range of formats and styles, while allowing that information to be searched and accessed quickly, and allowing the database integrity to be maintained.
In addition, different users will have different levels of access to different information depending on their seniority or the customers that they are dealing with.
The design of a customer knowledge database is therefore different to most other database designs and the database itself almost needs to be able to grow organically without intervention. In transaction environments this creates a large performance overhead. However, in a knowledge environment processing is less important than access, which means a more flexible design is preferable.
About Notanant and Marketing Knowledge
Notanant, our Marketing Knowledge System is designed to cope with the complexity of customer knowledge. It is uniquely able to model and manage any form of membership organisation. A membership organisation may be a company consisting of customers, channel and manufacturing and warehousing, it may be a club or association, it may be a list of your competitors and their outlets, it may even be subscribers to a magazine.
Notanant is designed around the notion of organisations. An organisation contains members, information, events, pictures etc. Each organisation can have its own documents, details, discussion or data associated with it. Each piece of data can be classified using user-definable scripts and classifications.
In use, the structure of the Notanant is extremely flexible. Users can build structures and adjust the structure of organisations and members at will meaning that as the real world changes around you, the database keeps up and doesn't need reprogramming.
The main database is accessed and updated through a browser (which may be a web or a wap-browser). which means that the database can be made available to across an Intranet, an Extranet or even across the web and is available to a mobile technical and sales force via mobile devices in addition to desktop call-centre approaches.
The web-based approach comes with access control and permissions to allow different people to capture different information and different people to read that information as their access permissions allow. The database also allows for documents to be published to customer records so a complete history of information can be captured. Where structured data is available, such as questionnaires or ad hoc data, the database needs to have the flexibility to add and access this additional information even if it is just for a relatively small number of customers which means there has to be flexibility to allow for a degree of organic growth.&
The database allows for searches by keyword or content, but will also provide immediate email alerts for breaking news, or a personalised newsletter sent out when required. For more formal studies, analysis would be carried out off-line, by taking extracts from the database. These extracts could include looking at the volume and type of communication between the customer and company in order to identify latent needs and wants.
For help and advice on building customer, competitor or marketing knowledge systems contact info@dobney.com or take a look at Notanant our on-line solution.