I can’t say for sure if your customers have moral character, but I can practically guarantee that they each have digital character.

“Digital character is this idea that almost everybody these days leaves behind a giant digital breadcrumb trail,” said Elizabeth Charnock, CEO at Cataphora, in a recent report by National Public Radio’s Yuki Noguchi. From Facebook posts and Tweets to online purchases and instant messages, each of your customers creates data, and lots of it. Taken together, all that data forms a customer’s digital character and it is hugely valuable to your business.

Enterprises have been trying to gain a single, comprehensive view of their customers’ digital character for years by aggregating data from various internal transactional databases into a centralized enterprise data warehouse – the Holy Data Temple. More recently, master data management technology has promised to make this job easier.

However, with some notable exceptions – Wal-Mart comes to mind – these efforts have largely failed due to technical challenges and cultural turf-wars over who “owns” the data. And with the advent of high-velocity social media and e-commerce data – aka Big Data – the job is only getting more difficult.

Enter vendors like Cataphora and ClickFox who do the heavy lifting of collecting, integrating and analyzing vast troves of Big Data for their enterprise customers. Typically, these vendors streamline and scale the process of gathering and integrating multiple streams of data into a comprehensive view for particular use cases. They develop proprietary algorithms to perform complex analytics and deliver results in any number of data visualizations.

In Cataphora’s case, the company collects and analyzes digital character data to weed out lees than desirable job applicants for its corporate customers. ClickFox collects and analyzes customer interaction data – IVR data, chat data, social media data – to provide its clients a complete view of the customer experience.

“Whether it be in the retail store, whether it be in our call centers, whether it be online on the Web, or whether it be on their device, we want to give [customers] a seamless experience that gives them the value that they believe they are paying for out of us,” said Lance Williams, Director of Customer Management at Sprint Nextel. Sprint uses ClickFox’s CEA platform to analyze cross-channel customer behavior data to spot trends and reduce customer churn.

The common thread running through Cataphora, ClickFox and similar Big Data-as-a-Service vendors is their ability to break down data silos, the age-old problem enterprises have been struggling with for years. The up-shot is that enterprises gain a complete picture of their customers’ (or potential employees’) digital character without having to build a pristine data temple on their own.