A frequent traveler books a hotel room online. When he gets to the hotel, he explains that he'd like to apply frequent-flyer points he's earned from a program affiliated with the hotel toward a free night's stay. The clerk at the hotel shakes his head; they have no record of the frequent-flyer award. The customer is dissatisfied and considers never doing business with the hotel chain again.
The scenario - in which a customer's demands are unfulfilled because the failure of customer information to flow from one application to another - is not uncommon, according to electronic-commerce leaders pledged to solve this problem with the Customer Profile Exchange (CPEX) standard.
The consortium recently announced the formation of a working group for CPEX, billed as a vendor-neutral open standard for sharing customer data across disparate applications and systems.
For IT professionals who implement e-commerce solutions, trying to achieve that consistent view through application integration takes development time and money, they note. Because customer data resides in a variety of applications and offline repositories, e-businesses are hard- pressed for a consistent, unified view of customers.
"Wouldn't it be great if everyone had the same way of representing [customer] data?" said Steven Mason, vice president of e-business solutions at the Billerica, Mass.-based data technologies division at Harte-Hanks, a CPEX consortium member.
The consortium's 21-member working group boasts leading vendors in the e-business and e-customer application arena. The standard they are developing will be based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), integrating customer profiles for back-office and front-office applications, and the Web. CPEX could potentially affect all aspects of how companies manage their customer relationships, including customer support, sales tracking, marketing campaigns, order tracking, enterprise relationship management, and decision support.
"It will standardize the way [customer] data is collected and stored," said George Favaloro, the Marlborough, Mass.-based director of marketing for e-commerce solutions at Compaq Computer.
According to organizers, CPEX will include a data model, transport, and query definitions. Plus, CPEX will encode privacy requirements with the customer data, so customers have a measure of control over what of their personal information is distributed.
The need for such a standard is clear. More than 90 percent of companies interviewed by Forrester Research, in Cambridge, Mass., believe that a single, integrated view of the customer is critical. Yet only 2 percent say they have achieved it.
"A company's left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing," said Matt Cutler, co-founder and chief e-business intelligence officer at net.Genesis, in Cambridge, Mass., and co-chair of the CPEX marketing committee. "There's a critical need to get a single holistic view of the customer."
The failure to keep such a holistic view is especially troubling in the e-business arena, because consumer expectations for getting their needs fulfilled are rising.
"By aggregating this information into a standardized format, we can provide an interoperable solution that, for example, lets any site provide the type of customized personal product recommendations that Amazon is famous for," said Fred Davis, president and CEO of Berkeley, Calif.-based Lumeria, a consortium member. "It would cost millions of dollars to do this on our own since it takes the coordination of thousands of companies and tens of thousands of sites."
If CPEX lives up to its billing, customers could experience better service, a reduction in the hassles of dealing with multiple companies, and some privacy protection over the personal data in the profile.
"To the extent that our customers desire that capability, we will support the standards initiative," said Brad Winney, senior vice president of business development at Personify, in San Francisco.
Plus, CPEX boosters say companies could sharpen their competitive edges by forging new information-sharing alliances.
There is agreement on the potential for a standard, but the CPEX working group has its work cut out.
"The biggest challenge [for CPEX] is that this is a big problem with a lot of people involved," said Eric Schmitt, an analyst at Forrester Research. "Anytime you have a lot of people involved, it is difficult" to agree on a standard, he added.
"Without a coordinated effort at standardizing XML tags and DTDs [Document Type Definitions], the Web could lose interoperability because of fragmentation of XML," Davis said.
The first CPEX specifications are slated for the first half of 2000, Cutler said. Interoperability demos are expected in the second half of the year with products to follow, he said. More on CPEX will soon be available at www.cpex.org.
This story from Infoworld.com Copyright © 1999 InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.
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