Marketing Automation Technology Strategy
Data And Application Architecture
Pinpoint’s Marketing Technology Strategy Service produces a data and application architecture that delivers timely and relevant information to your processes, customers, customer-facing employees and knowledge workers. We perform a holistic assessment of existing marketing systems and business processes against customer information needs. Then our system architects design the interconnections and modifications to existing systems, and recommend new or replacement applications where legacy applications cannot meet key requirements.
Pinpoint’s approach is to assess your existing technologies as they relate to the customer information strategy; these technologies may include a customer relationship management (CRM) system, the marketing subsystem of an ERP, the corporate website, a call-center automation system, a print production and/or traffic management application, an email-marketing support system (or outsourced service), and the customer database (or frequently, databases). It is not uncommon to discover a rich multiplicity of such “stovepiped” systems and databases, poorly integrated (if at all); and such a technology environment is literally standing in the way of realizing the organization’s marketing goals.
Customer Information Strategy
Pinpoint’s principal effort here is to specify the changes required in order to enable realization of the customer information strategy. This may involve: the selective replacement of some systems; upgrading and/or creating new or modified interfaces to others; and perhaps simply eliminating certain standalone databases which create more problems than they solve. Where replacement is the best option, we specify new components that help move the environment in a more “open” direction. In the data-management arena, we specify creation or modification of a customer data warehouse, conforming to a data architecture that minimizes duplication.
Pinpoint’s Marketing Automation Technology Strategy service produces “as-is” and “to-be” maps, clearly showing how the recommended technology structure will better support the desired business capabilities. The architectures created are designed to enable the consistent application of business rules across systems, functions and customer touch points.