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Understanding Profiles

A profile is a PeopleSoft Customer Relationship Management (CRM) business tool with multiple uses. Profiles reference data to and from the Customer Data Model (CDM), transactional tables, or user defined profile tables. Use profiles to:

System and User-Defined Profile Data

Customer Relationship Management uses the Customer Data Model as a centralized data storage repository to retain extensive individual and organization information. To maximize system performance, PeopleSoft Marketing and Online Marketing use a subset of the CDM data that is stored in a set of three basic data tables. When additional individual or organization information is needed but not contained in the delivered data tables, PeopleSoft Marketing enables you to define new profiles and profile fields in the language that you want. A system administrator uses PeopleSoft Application Designer to create the corresponding physical tables and fields and then maps them to the requested definitions. Whether data resides in the predefined system tables or your user-defined profile tables, You can use it for all functions by using one or more profiles.

PeopleSoft CRM delivers two profiles with the system, one for individuals and one for organizations. The two delivered profiles are listed with the profile name People under the type Individual and Companies under the type Organization. The Individual: People and Organization: Company profiles cover profile needs related to basic contact data (for example, name, address, company name, and so on). Additionally, each user-defined profile table has a corresponding profile to reference the data that is stored there. Use profiles in combination to access information in any or all tables.

Note: When moving profiles between environments, you should always manually re-create them. Moving profiles using Data Mover is not supported.

Profile Usage

Consider these examples of the various ways to use profiles.

Suppose that your company operates a national chain of pet supply stores and that you are part of the team charged with making your marketing efforts more effective. Your team believes that one way to accomplish this is by targeting current and potential customers with promotions that are specific to the pets they own, and you decide to test it with an online marketing campaign. As part of the campaign, you purchase a list of subscribers to various pet magazines. Using your Individual: People profile, import the subscriber list into your Customer Relationship Management database.

Using your Individual: People profile, you can create a target audience of customers who have an email address on record. Use PeopleSoft Online Marketing to create an online dialog and send that target audience an email broadcast offer. The email directs respondents to a PeopleSoft Online Marketing web page that offers a free gift for each pet in the household. To receive the gift, respondents must enter or update information about each pet.

A few months ago, your company started gathering data on customers' pets. At that time, a user-defined profile was created to store several pieces of information. The web page to which you directed the respondents was created in PeopleSoft Online Marketing using your individual: people and pet profiles. As you created the page, you used several of the profile fields to display questions. As respondents answer the questions, the respondent's profile data is updated in the Customer Relationship Management database in real time.

When the information gathering phase of the dialog is complete, you launch another follow-up email that is targeted to the respondents. This time, you use the individual people and pet profiles to tailor email messages and promotions. While viewing the types of information that are gathered by these profiles, you see that you can differentiate customers by the type of pet they own. Using the Pet type as a search criteria, you create separate emailing lists for Cat, Dog, Rodent, Horse, and Bird. When the results are in, you find that this personalized, targeted approach is far more effective than other marketing efforts and you decide to expand it to your entire customer base.

Note: The People profile is a system profile. While you can make changes to it (for example, changing existing fields or adding new ones), this activity is considered customization.

Profiles and Marketing Center Security

If you have enabled Marketing Center Security, when you create a profile you can designate it as secure. When performing a search for profiles, only those secured profiles that a user has permission to access (that is, that they are authorized for at least one of the Marketing Centers associated with the profile) will be displayed as part of the search results. Profile definition functionality for documents and audiences will only display profiles that the user is authorized to access.

Note: Only custom profiles (that is, not AAF based profiles such as Case History and so forth) will be available for security. The People profile, because it should always be available for all users, cannot be secured.

See the product documentation for PeopleSoft EPM CRM Warehouse.

PeopleSoft CRM Online Marketing enables marketers to define profiles and profile fields that collect customer profile information, online, such as color or brand preference. After the marketers register and activate profiles and profile fields, you can configure profile groups that enable CDM components to access profile data. You can also set up the configurable search to use profile fields as search criteria.

To configure profile data for displaying and updating in CDM components, define a profile group that includes the profile fields and attach the profile group to CDM components. You can also use the Active Analytics Framework (AAF) to define conditions under which the profile data appears.

See Understanding AAF and Understanding the Use of Active Analytics Framework in CRM.

The More Info page of the Company and Person components enables you to view and update profile information. Read-only profile data appears on the Summary page of the Company component.

Note: You can specify that the profile group data appears as read-only on the More Info page.

This topic lists common elements used in these topics and discusses profile data in the customer data model (CDM).

Field or Control

Definition
Profile Field

A specific bit of information that is captured about the customer. For example, contact lens customers of an optical supply seller might have profile fields for the preferred color, preferred type (extended wear or daily wear), brand preference, optometrist, prescription, date of last purchase, and care kit provided. Profile fields are keyed by BO_ID.
Profile Group

An arbitrary collection of profile fields for display purposes. For example, the optical supply seller might have a profile group for contact lens information, eyeglass information, and sunglass information.
Condition

Information that controls when the profile group is displayed. After you set up profile groups, you can define the conditions for displaying and updating a profile group in a component. A read-only profile summary appears on the primary page for every component that meets the conditions, and a profile information page for updating profiles is added to the component.

For example, the condition for displaying the Contact Lens Info profile group in the Consumer component is that the consumer either previously purchased contact lenses or has requested contact lens information.