If you want to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, you’d better understand your customers’ entire lifecycle.

“If a customer comes at you from one viewpoint, maybe the web, and you don’t correlate that back to a call-center experience, you really lose out to when the customer went left or right,” said Rob Strickland, president of Bellevue, Wash.-based Strickland Consulting. “We always leave these footprints in the sand, but very few companies have been able to pour concrete over them, then lift them up and say, ‘Here’s what happened.’”

The problem was that until recently technology made it difficult to get this complete view of the customer lifecycle. Doing so requires processing lots of data very quickly and flexible analytic tools to run on top of that data, neither of which was readily available. Until now.

The first issue – processing huge data volumes in near-real-time – is now possible thank to the development of a new breed of data warehouse appliance. Massively parallel processing warehouses, like those from EMC Greenplum and Aster Data, can load significantly larger volumes of data significantly faster than traditional data warehouses can.

The second issue – deploying flexible analytics tools on top of the data – has been alleviated thanks to the development of cloud computing. Now, enterprises can experiment with analytics tools like ClickFox CEA in the cloud, and then move to a full-scale on-premise deployment when it makes sense. Or they can just continue using the analytics tool on-demand. It’s all about options.

“You try, you like, you buy,” explained Strickland, speaking to Wikibon’s Dave Vellante and SiliconANGLE’s John Furrier from the floor of EMC World 2011. “That’s the other thing that’s amazing: You can put this stuff in the cloud and if you really have to be on-premise and put it on your tiles, you can do that later. Or you can do it at the very beginning. So it’s really very flexible.”

The ability to view the complete customer lifecycle is key to simultaneously cutting costs and driving revenue, Strickland said live on theCube.

“You got the cost curve and you’ve got the revenue curve. If you don’t tie those two together with the customer experience then you lose,” Strickland said. “When you have companies like ClickFox that take customer experience and actually expose it, you can actually drive up the revenue because you find out where people are really helping you make money. And you also you can cut out the costs.

“So now you lift those two curves in their appropriate directions and now you have the margin that you want. And now you’re a profitable business.”

The ability to view the customer experience in near-real-time is also a critical component, he said. Enterprises need to be able to intervene with an unhappy customer while they are engaged on the phone, in a chat or elsewhere. A phone call a day later to a disgruntled customer just doesn’t cut it anymore.

“If you miss that opportunity, its sort of like the Justin Bieber effect,” Strickland explained. “They’re gone.”