Customer profiling is important for better targeting customer services and making policy decisions better. This is one of the conclusions of the E-Gov Academy on Customer Profiling held in Norwich. The partners who attended agreed on further cooperating on this issue by doing research pilots and exchanging methods and data.

Addresses

Richard Webber (Originsinfo - http://www.originsinfo.com) showed the partners how municipalities and governments could profit from knowledge already present in their address databases. By a simple name and an address and by making use of existing background information, you can read a lot of information leading to better profiling. Customer profiling is useful in domains as health, police, fire, council tax, eductaion, parks, libraries, leisure, road safety, tourist development.

Holistic approach

Louise Cornell (Norfolk County Council) told the partners how the project "services2together" led to a better understanding of needs in rural areas: information and advice, police, social activities and utility-services. Rational analysis was the first step of a process where other methodologies were combined. Important in her story that only a holistic approach could lead to better service development.

Multiple data sources

Wendy Pontin and Steven Pearson (Norfolk County Council) showed the partners some examples of how Norfolk County uses customer profiling for service development or re-engineering services: lifestyles of library-visitors, segmentation, statistics,... Norfolk County uses www.norfolkdata.net for those purposes. One of the lessons in this session is that you should use all data which could be used, and not simply rely on one source: statistics, transactions data, surveys,...

Sheila Apicella (ESD) told the partners in her presentation how profiling leads to better targeting of products. Linking profiles to products gives a better insight on which users use what service on which channel.

Business case

The whole day showed there is enough data and tools for doing customer research and customer profiling. But all research starts with a good business question:
* does an organisation wants to use a cheaper channel for some service?
* does an organisation wants to improve service delivery?
* does an organisation wants to target better services?
All these questions can be answered by customer profiling.

To conclude Tim Anderson (Norfolk County Council) summarised the findings of the day. In the Work Package 5 of Smart Cities, where Norfolk County is leading, pilots will be developed locally and transnationally. Also generic data sources will be used.

More about these actions can be read in the report (only for registered users): http://www.smartcities.info/academy-customer-profiling-norwich-march-200...