Sharing Customer Knowledge
The customer knowledge that you gather is of no use unless it is shared with those people who need to know. For this reason, passive databases that simply record information are inappropriate, the database also needs to be designed so that it can push key information to relevant parties.
Customer databases and customer analysis is often the preserve of an individual or a small team in the head office who collect and store the information they have on an individual computer. Periodically there are reports and presentations, but typically at the macro level and sometimes quite removed from the day to day experiences of the customer facing sales and service teams.
In customer knowledge is to be really useful, it has to be seen to add value to people's day-to-day work. If all it does is captures information to a central point, then use will quickly tail-off as the database disappears from view among the hundred and one other things on peoples' desks (the black hole problem).
A key aspect of the customer database design is in creating a database that will also package up and send out information to interested parties either in a news flash, for information marked as urgent, or in an electronic newsletter format where data is considered interesting but not urgent.
Typically each user will have a different range of customers and subjects that they are interested in, and different levels of security access to different pieces of information. The database therefore needs to match appropriate information to each user and send it out at the most appropriate time.
Typically a news flash or a newsletter will simply provide top-line information plus a hyperlink. To access the full article or document will require use of the hyperlink to access the information.
In this way, the database is continually being used to keep people informed and to keep people up-to-date. By making the data and knowledge circulate, the use of the database will increase.