What Is A Single Customer View?

Data would be the gasoline for modern marketing if it were an automobile. With customers creating massive quantities of data each day, retailers have a wealth of information at their disposal to better understand their customers wants & interests. Nevertheless, not all information is generated equally. A single customer view is the most reliable source of data for tailoring the customer journey & implementing educated new marketing platform for businesses .

If you are not certain what it implies or how to use it in your business model? Then you should check out this blog article.

What exactly is a single customer view?

A single customer view implies that there is a single location for each individual with whom you do business that gives a snapshot of all the information you've gathered about them. This perspective is often represented by a personal profile page in a Consumer Data Platform or customer relationship management (CRM) software.

To establish a single customer view, you must gather consumer information in real-time from all of your channels including organizational systems. This data may be gathered from a variety of sources, including your site, in-store retail deals, marketing tools, social media platforms, or customer support contacts. Once gathered, the data must be cleaned, synthesized, and stored in a single area in which every team & tool can access it promptly without the interference of engineers and data analysts.

What are the advantages of having a unified customer view?

A single customer view ought to be at the center of your organization. It provides essential information to all departments for them to operate better. Executives, for instance, benefit from more precise data to make choices, while marketers benefit from more successful campaigns & customer service workers benefit from faster problem resolution.

Ensure that your marketing is tailored across all media

Personalization can only be delivered with up-to-date & pertinent information. If it isn't, your message, offer, or advice will perplex or irritate your consumers (like an offer coupon for an item).

With a single, precise view of each consumer that is refreshed in real-time, you can reliably adapt your promotional efforts to each person. It prohibits marketers from using out-of-date data or separate departments from having their partial image of each consumer.

By delivering the correct message at the right moment throughout the user journey, you can make consumers feel that you know and comprehend them, resulting in stronger engagement & lifetime value (LTV).

Obtain immediate accessibility to client data throughout the enterprise

Everyone in your firm understands where to seek and save customer data when you have a single customer view. This feature saves time spent locating and confirming information, which makes the information more helpful to the entire business.

When a participant in a conference, for instance, wants information about a client to support a claim or a conclusion, they can accomplish this promptly & with confidence that the information they're seeing is true and currently accurate.

Better comprehend customers with segmentation & analytics

A unified view of the consumer guarantees that clients are appropriately categorized & enables more precise categorization over time. Your organization knows that "Jonathan desktop" or "Jonathan mobile" are both the same individual and therefore can synthesize this data, which is impossible without a single customer's perspective.

Consider segmentation to be the process of applying labels to consumers (as well as oftentimes attempting to remove them) as you begin to understand them. This procedure may begin with a tag for "potential" when they initially browse your website, which is supplanted by one for "client" once those who make a portable purchase. These people may eventually be labeled as "high-value clients," "left a cart," and "engaged in footwear."

These tags are used by teams within your organization to categorize individuals so that they can evaluate their behavior, create marketing efforts, and effectively give personalized messages, offers, solutions, or suggestions .

Provide exceptional client service.

A unified picture of the client provides assistance personnel with the knowledge they require to respond to consumer requests swiftly or perhaps even strategically. They can view a person's behaviors and prior interactions inside one spot, to the minute.

Assume a consumer contacts your company via live chat on your site. The unified customer view demonstrates how they get stuck while completing a contact page as well as which goods they looked at previously. Your representative can utilize this data to provide a quick solution or special offering before requiring any further data from the consumer.

Building components for a 360-degree view of the consumer

As previously said, developing a unified customer picture is a difficult procedure that requires combining data from many online devices & removing so-called information silos.

From a practical standpoint, you should concentrate on the three important factors outlined below.

#1 Customer Journey Perspective

To achieve an SCV, you must first have a broad understanding of a person's engagements with your brand before zooming in on the little actions they take with the business. It implies you analyze their current and previous moves, traveling back & forward because it's a non-linear route. Then you can simply foresee the next few stages.

Furthermore, you track users throughout all channels, observe how they transition between them, and keep aware of the pain spots to assist customers who become stuck at a certain point.

User journey analytics can help you link and evaluate all of these data points.

#2 Linked user data

After you've gathered all of your sources of data, whether they're from your CRM, email layout, email marketing framework, or transaction-oriented system, you must combine the information into single records. Having a complete directional persona of your customers as well as prospects. This is what a customer 360° view is all about.

You may utilize a CDP (Customer data platform) for this task, which allows you to aggregate every piece of information on your customers & provides you with a detailed overview of actions individuals perform on your site, especially on smartphones, or even at your central shop.

Customers are most typically matched by CDPs utilizing their email addresses. Because each address is specific for individuals, you can recognize & match people across very large data sets. This refers to the deterministic pairing approach, which guarantees accuracy of 80-90%.

With so much profile matching precision, you can construct a comprehensive & extendable library of individual profiles, that you can subsequently enhance throughout the entire user experience users have with your business.

#3 Effective approach

A 360-degree consumer perspective takes much work & forethought. You may establish the scope & objective of your project with a detailed plan. First and foremost, you must determine what you intend to accomplish with it and how it will benefit your firm.

It also involves several firm divisions, preparing to implement business-wide transformations, and administering multiple resources ranging from finances to assets to external providers.

Then you must prioritize sources of information & select technology tools to assist you in gathering, integrating, and analyzing data before putting it to good use.

Obstacles to creating a Single Customer View

The path to a 360-degree consumer perspective is lengthy & twisty, and marketers that travel it must confront significant hurdles & challenges. Expenditures, legal compliance, segregated information, domestic politics, data retrieval, mismatched systems, or talents are all examples.

As per new Experian data, over 80% of marketers are having difficulty attaining a 360-degree user perspective.

A few hurdles are simpler to overcome, particularly when leadership recognizes that the primary objective is worthwhile. That is the situation whether it pertains to money or company politics. Another may need additional money or time or effort.

Data of poor quality

Data quality is crucial for your marketing activities. To construct an SCV, you must first ensure that you have dependable & reliable info about your clients. Marketing & customer experience specialists must be aware of this issue.

Part of this procedure includes maintaining your information as it may become obsolete. That is why it is critical to periodically examine your database and, more critically, verify your sources of data.

Disconnected data

Nevertheless, more than half of corporate brand managers say the greatest barrier to developing a genuinely cross-channel business plan is integrating data to establish an SCV. This, in my opinion, is due to the absence of appropriate technologies to make the procedure easier.

Luckily, there are several options available to assist businesses in their pursuit of stellar customer records. CDPs are one of the best and were initially designed for activities on client data. This solution allows you to collect user information from many sources, generate precise segmentation, and then utilize this information efficiently in both content customization and retargeting efforts.

Compliance with the law

Then there's the issue of privacy laws growing over the world. They are meant to give users more access to their data, which is dispersed throughout the digital environment. If your company wants to create a single customer perspective, you must adhere to the standards of these laws, whether GDPR or the country's data privacy act. This entails putting in place a permission management program as well as methods for handling customer data requests.

Old technologies/systems

Many businesses struggle to be using data although having a lot of information at their disposal because they continue to rely on antiquated technologies. Together with data standards, this is the most significant impediment to system integration.

Furthermore, when it comes to creating a single customer view, data integration is critical. Marketers must deal with data that is dispersed across platforms & trapped in antiquated platforms. Furthermore, there's a strong risk that your historical data will not match the new scheme format or will be inaccessible in newer technologies and will be housed solely in a database system.

Besides that, old systems may contain obsolete nomenclature or processes that impede comprehension of current methodologies.

What is the difference between a Single Customer View and a Data Warehouse?

Many people confuse Data Warehouses and Single Customer Views, yet the two fulfill distinct objectives. The major distinction between a Data Warehouse as well as a Single Customer View is that the former is a Big Digital storage system that houses all of a company's business information in an unorganized repository. In contrast, a Single Customer View is built utilizing specialized business information that is streamlined & formatted for an intended task.

Another distinction is the quantity of information included within a Data Warehouse. A Data Warehouse, because of its scale and complexity, necessitates IT administration & incorporates data from numerous divisions. A single data source unifies the data.

Last thoughts

The statistics speak for themself: A 360-degree customer perspective is an extremely efficient approach to handling user data. But we all understand that this subject might raise a lot of concerns. That's fantastic! Our specialists would gladly offer their expertise on how to utilize it to increase both revenue and customer retention .

We'd also be happy to educate you on concerns concerning the handling of your customers' data following current and forthcoming data protection legislation.