In my last two posts I talked about two different sources of volunteered personal information: ‘my head’ (e.g. my future purchasing plans, my attitudes or beliefs) and ‘the things I do’, which are now increasingly captured via my digital slug trail.

The slug trail is important because it creates a new type of data with rich marketing potential. Take a simple example. If I buy a book from Amazon, I create a digital slug trail which it records – a history of my transactions which it uses to create recommendations for future purchases. When I buy a book from Waterstones, or Borders, or W H Smiths, the same thing happens. They each have their own, separate digital slug trail, each of which sees only one part of my overall book-purchasing profile – a restricted view which is almost certainly misleading in some way.

Only I, as the buyer, have a view of all these different slug trails. Only I can put them together to create a genuinely accurate, rounded picture of my personal library (if I want to).

This principle applies to every purchasing category, including financial services.

This simple analysis of one aspect of VPI exposes an irredeemable flaw in the concept of ‘the single customer view’ as invented by CRM (Customer Relationship Management).

The ‘single customer view’ as espoused by CRM practitioners is, in fact, a narcissistic, organisation-centric view of the customer: it only sees (it can only see) that customer’s dealings from the point of view of that particular organisation. It does not see the world of supply and suppliers through the eyes of the customer.

As Project VRM puts it the user/buyer, not the seller, is the natural point of customer data integration; not the organisation. (By the way, VRM stands for Vendor Relationship Management i.e. it looks at ‘relationship management’ from the point of view of the buyer managing sellers/vendors rather than the other way round.)

This little example illustrates two things:

1)    how the alternative VPI perspective throws new light on old, intractable problems such as ‘a single customer view’.
2)    VPI’s transformational potential – its ability to reach dimensions of information and insight that no other, traditional, forms of customer data can reach.


Alan Mitchell          www.ctrl-shift.co.uk