As marketers, we know that understanding your customers and their needs is essential. However, even as consumers, we frequently have experiences with brands that often show very little knowledge of who we are or what we’re interested in. Imagine a brand that tailors its communication and messaging to your needs and interests! Your organisation can be that brand – with a Single Customer View.
What is a Single Customer View?
A Single Customer View will give your organisation a clear view of your customers wants, needs and interests by pulling together data from multiple sources. These are often hard to bring together due to complicated systems, siloed data and legacy platforms.
“The concept of the single customer view (SCV) is often defined as an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organisation about its customers. A single customer view enables companies to understand and better engage with customers by knowing who they are and what they are looking for.”(1)
A recent survey(2) showed the number 1 challenge for 48% of enterprise CX leaders was not having a single view of the customer.
By creating a single customer view, you will:
- Bring all your data into one place to create a single source of truth
- Have visibility of interactions and behaviours of your customers
- Record channel and device and communication preferences of customers
- And using this information be able to create highly personalised and relevant customer journeys
As customers, we see brands as a whole rather than in-store, online or even over the phone as separate entities – so we must give them a consistent approach and understand who they are and what their needs are.
Use Case: One of our clients could not merge their offline and online sales. This meant that their customers had different experiences in-store and online. By creating a single customer view, they were able to improve the loyalty of their customers and sales, as they could tailor their communications and offerings as they presented to their clients in a unified way.
Using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) will help you create a unified single customer view that will enable your team to drive better campaigns and experiences for your customers, leading to better outcomes in sales and loyalty. Some of the key challenges a CDP helps you overcome are:
- Legacy Systems
Most enterprise-level organisations have legacy systems that are well entrenched and often make it difficult for marketing to easily and quickly access data. For example, a CDP can integrate with legacy systems and pull this data into one place for marketing to run campaigns and communications that are highly personalised and relevant to their customers.
- Siloed Data
When data is in disparate systems, it can also be challenging for marketing to access quickly. For example, a CDP should be platform-agnostic and allow you to integrate with your existing tools, pulling data from multiple sources into one place to create your Single Customer View.
- Data Quality
Your insights are only as good as the data you have, so you must maintain clean data and a single source of truth. Bringing all your data into one place where it can easily be managed is a huge asset to your marketing and business efforts.
- Regulatory Requirements & Compliance
Many industries have specific regulatory requirements. Using a flexible CDP to respect your business rules makes it simple to comply with regional laws, EU GDPR, and protect PII—choosing a CDP that can be stored on-premise or on the cloud gives you more control over handling data.
- Security
Protecting your data is essential, so ensuring you work with a CDP accredited by an independent and internationally recognised body must be criteria for selecting a provider. ISO27001 and SOC 2 are both internationally recognised as best practice frameworks and processes for the secure management of information.
Conclusion
Getting a Single Customer view should be a priority for any marketing team. It will enable you to get a clear view of your customers’ likes and dislikes. It allows you to bring disparate data sets into one place. A good CDP will enable you to see your customers in real-time and make accessing and using the data quicker, meaning you can run campaigns more effectively and efficiently.
You benefit from higher engagement, sales, and loyalty when you can deliver highly personalised and relevant offers to your customers.
The n3 Hub CDP delivers marketing and CX utopia by bringing customer data, point of sale, offers, sentiment and product information together to easily access and share Single Customer View. It generates segments and allows relevant, consistent and personalised content for each customer that can be shared over various channels using your existing marketing platforms.
Get in touch today to see how n3 Hub can deliver results to your marketing team.
References
https://www.pointillist.com/blog/single-customer-view-better-cx/
https://www.pointillist.com/blog/cx-survey-2021-journey-management-cx-measurement/