single view of customer case study

Three brand case studies on creating a single customer view

Even in the UK where online shopping is at its highest (compared to offline), the percentage of transactions that happen online is around 13%. 

Which basically means that 87% of purchases happen offline and therefore 87% of purchase data potentially goes uncaptured.

As I clarified in What is the single customer view (SCV) and why do you need it? a SCV provides businesses with the ability to track customers and their communications across every channel, offline and online.

The obvious benefits of this include much improved customer service levels, better customer retention, higher conversion rates and an improved overall customer lifetime value (CLV). 

If brands are to have any hope in obtaining a true SCV, they will have to think of ways to join the dots between offline retail and digital so they can capture that remaining 87% of purchase data.

Using our downloadable report Single Customer View: Myth or Reality? and our case study database let’s take a look at a few brands who are working to achieve this.

Club Clarins was set up by cosmetics company Clarins more than two years ago as a way to tackle the gap between retail and online and of course to help build SCV. 

The scheme is a simple but effective way to incentivise customers to hand over purchase-history data online after they’ve purchased a Clarins product in a department store.

Club Clarins then offers the opportunity to redeem special gifts and sample sets reserved just for ‘VIPs’, track your purchases, rewards, and earn points.

Registrants enter a UPC barcode from the product into the Clarins website, then once a customer hits a reward threshold, they can begin redeeming points.

The ‘VIP’ angle is a little misleading, as anyone can sign up, and you don’t have to buy a product first. 

However as a high-end cosmetics brand with heritage, it’s easy for Clarins to create the impression of exclusivity that its customers want to be a part of.

United Airlines

After merging with Continental Airlines in 2012, United Airlines needed to integrate the two companies’ websites. At the same time, United implemented tag management, to ensure that its analytics and marketing pixel tagging was accurate, and ultimately work towards a single customer view across all channels.

At the time of the merger, United Airlines had no testing program. The company enlisted the help of Ensighten to unify tagging across every digital touchpoint, including mobile apps and kiosks. 

This enabled United to deploy new tests within a matter of weeks, while also proving that the tests had no negative impact on the website.

The airline had limited IT resources but it was able to run an optimisation program to increase agility. The Data Layer unified all customer data, enabling United Airlines to have cleaner data, greater consistency across applications, and to eliminate data silos.

United Airlines was able to boost its marketing ROI by improving its analytics and optimisation programmes, unifying customer data and enable greater mobile marketing agility.

The project delivered eight-digit ROI within 10 months and, as Michael Venditti, manager of data strategy & infrastructure at United Airlines said, the work “unified our data and provided a 360-degree view of the customer.”

Speciality Fashion Group

Speciality Fashion Group (SFG) is Australia’s largest retailer of women’s fashion. The company wanted to give its various brands access to customer insights through real-time reporting and ad-hoc analytics, to enable responsive, data-driven marketing campaigns.

Over the course of three months, SFG worked with SDL to implement a campaign and analytics project which saw it streamline marketing processes, and enabled the organisation to deliver personalised, targeted communications based on the behaviour of individual customers.

With real-time reporting SFG was also able to deliver accurate business updates for weekly executive meetings, providing important insights to decision makers.

A member who shops both online and in-store is worth 2.6 times more than in-store-only members. SFG captures online behavioural data to merge with customer data, where it can be analysed and pushed to stores to support cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Production times for electronic direct mail (EDM) was reduced from 24 hours to less than two hours. Since implementing the solution, the most recent 200 EDM campaigns delivered an ROI of 2,200%, as well as the following:

• EDM open rate uplift of 12% on industry benchmarks 
• EDM click-through rate uplift of 44% against industry benchmarks 
• Increase in email member contribution to sales from 32.4% to 45.7%
• Average campaign ROI of over 1,800%

For many more similar case studies covering a range of topics, check out our case study library , and for more information on SCV download our report Single Customer View: Myth or Reality .

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

6 Steps to Build a Single Customer View & Improve Customer Experience

Updated: June 21, 2021

Published: June 18, 2021

Ever see those cool 360-degree cameras on red carpets at award shows?

Someone famous will stand in the middle and several cameras positioned all around will simultaneously capture pictures of the star, creating a spectacular image that gives you a 360 view of the person.

Now, imagine if you could do that with your target audience? Capture them from all angles as they interact with your brand. With a single customer view, you can.

The issue is, many businesses struggle to know where to start.

At the end of this article, you’ll understand what a single customer view is and how to create one for your brand.

What is a single customer view?

Single customer view (SCV) is a centralized platform where you can have a holistic view of your customers across the entire buyer’s journey. With an SCV, you can identify and track every interaction you have with current and prospective customers, which enables you to develop relevant and targeted strategies.

A single customer view combines data from a consumer’s behavior on web and email, social media activity, demographics, interactions with customer service, and purchase history.

Let’s go through an example of an interaction between a consumer and a brand.

A consumer, let’s call her Jazmyn, discovers a brand on Instagram. Jazmyn visits the brand’s website through Instagram and downloads a free offer. Said brand adds Jazmyn to an email list and she starts receiving nurturing emails.

After months of no interactions, Jazmyn rediscovers the brand and makes a purchase. A month after that, she calls customer service regarding an issue with her product.

In just a few months, Jazmyn has interacted with at least three departments within the company: marketing, sales, and customer service. In many businesses, every department tracks data using its own system.

For instance, sales teams often use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track their interactions with clients and prospects while marketing teams use marketing platforms and automation tools to generate leads.

This creates huge data gaps, making it difficult to understand how a user is behaving over an extended period of time beyond a single vertical. It can also lead to duplicate information, leading to dirty data.

For instance, Jazmyn might receive ads for products she’s already purchased. Or she may get a call from customer service asking about a product she’s already reviewed via email.

Having a single customer view allows organizations to build personalized interactions with consumers, based on their current stage in the customer lifecycle. This creates a better customer experience, stronger brand loyalty, and better retention rates.

When you know where your target audience is, you can make enticing offers based on their current needs. It’s personalization at its best.

Benefits of a Single Customer View

When you invest in a platform with a single customer view, you:

• Have cleaner data – With an integrated system, you remove information silos, which often cause data duplication.
• Gather better insights – When you have an accurate map of the customer journey, you can better understand how your campaigns are performing and identify areas of improvement.
• Assign proper credit to the right channels – Proper attribution is a major issue when it comes to audience tracking. With an SCV, you can identify the best and worst-performing channels for future campaigns.

How to Create a Single Customer View

• Align your data owners and your KPIs.
• Find the right tech.
• Hire data managers.
• Sort and integrate all data from your legacy systems.
• Set your data governance strategy.
• Test your processes.

1. Align your data owners and your KPIs.

The first step in creating an SCV is aligning all your data owners across your organization.

It’s important to align your teams early on key targets and key progress indicators . This keeps everyone on the same page and striving toward the same goal.

So, although everyone will be working on different sections, they’ll all be contributing to the same objective. This is key in keeping everyone in the same mindset and easing the transition to a data-driven approach.

Your data owners will serve as liaisons between IT and your team, enforcing governance standards and supplying IT with the access they need.

During this process, your IT team will be instrumental, as they will need to consolidate data from multiple systems and sources.

2. Find the right tech.

The next step is finding a platform with the capabilities to support your company’s needs.

Key features to consider when searching for a platform include:

• Usability and accessibility of software
• CRM Integration
• Data quality tools

You’ll also want to consider the size of your company and the scalability of the software. all-in-one CRM platform like HubSpot , which combines sales, marketing, customer service data to support a holistic customer experience.

3. Hire data managers.

Depending on your company size, you may want to onboard roles dedicated to data, such as data miners, data analysts, and data migration specialists.

The process of migrating data is a costly and time-consuming one that you may not be equipped for. Instead, hire experts with the knowledge and experience to do it right.

They will be essential not only during the initial building phase but also as you grow your customer base.

4. Sort and integrate all data from your legacy systems.

If you’re an established brand with a ton of scattered data, you’ll need to sort through your systems.

Start by conducting an audit of your data quality. From there, clean your data so you can start integrating it with your other systems, including:

• Your data warehouse
• Your point-of-sale systems
• Your marketing automation systems
• Your call center systems

5. Set your data governance strategy.

As you’re in the process of cleaning out old data, you’ll need a new system for new, incoming data.

This is where your data governance standards come into play. They serve as operating guidelines for retrieving, storing, and processing data.

You may wonder, what’s the difference between a data management strategy and a data governance strategy? The former refers to the actions you take to fulfill the guidelines outlined in your governance strategy.

To learn about how to develop a governance strategy, click here .

6. Test your processes.

The last step in this process is testing your new centralized system.

To ensure that your new environment works (i.e., that the data linkage is complete), some test data will need to be used to ensure the data is gathered, stored, and reported correctly on your platform.

This will likely be an ongoing process as your business scales and you implement new touchpoints.

The earlier your team can implement a single customer view framework, the better equipped you will be to serve your target audience. While the process can be expensive and time-consuming, it’s a worthwhile investment that will be instrumental in making strategic business decisions.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

Everything You Need to Know About Behavioral Segmentation [+ Examples]

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Operations in One Place

What Is Content Operations? A Straight-Forward Guide

15 Automation Ideas for Delivering Excellent HR Support

Predictive Lead Scoring: What It Is and Why It's Important

Marketing vs. Operations: The Battle for a Small Business' Attention

Everything You Need to Know About Segmentation Bases 

What is Lead to Account Matching, and Why It Matters

Marketing Qualified Lead: Everything You Need to Know About MQLs

What Is Attribution Modeling and Why It’s So Important

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

Single Customer View: What It Is & How to Use It

A single customer view ( SCV ) is a way of gathering customer data in one record. This can improve your customer relationship management strategy .

Customers nowadays interact with companies via a variety of devices and marketing channels. By analyzing customer interactions, you can better understand your customers’ needs. But first, you need to consolidate the different types of data — which can be a challenge. In fact, 87% of marketers consider data their company’s most underutilized asset.

One way to make the most of the data is with a single customer view (SCV), which groups customer data in one place. An SCV gives you a clear picture of the customer journey across touchpoints. This can help you streamline your marketing efforts and provide a seamless customer experience.

Read on to learn what a single customer view is, why it’s important, and how to create an SCV for your business.

• What is a single customer view?

Benefits of using a single customer view

Common single customer view issues, how to create a single customer view, single customer view use cases in marketing, what is a single customer view (scv).

A single customer view, also known as a unified customer view, is a way of collecting customer information from different data sources in a single record. This includes first-party data and offline data such as:

• Contact information (email, phone number, etc.)
• Demographics (age, gender, location, etc.)
• In-store visits and online purchase history
• Point-of-sale (POS) and transactional data
• Social media or marketing campaign statistics
• Customer support interactions

Often, this data is scattered across different departments and sources. Many companies need a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or customer data platform (CDP) to merge the data and create an SCV.

For example, Brevo makes it simple to access customer data. All the contact information you need can be found in a single customer profile, which also gives you a 360-degree timeline of previous interactions across channels.

Find out more: What is a CDP?

Example of a single customer view in Brevo’s CRM suite

Having a single view of your customer data can save you valuable time and money. Here are just a few ways SCV can benefit your company.

Better collaboration

SCV centralizes customer data in one record and makes it accessible across your organization. With a unified customer view, product, customer support, and marketing teams have access to the same information. This lowers the risk of duplicate data and boosts efficiency.

Seamless customer experiences across channels

With SCV, businesses get a 360-degree view of the customer journey. A single view lets them better understand customer needs at different touchpoints across channels. This helps them improve their omnichannel marketing strategy and provide a seamless user experience.

Better targeting and segmentation

SCV organizes customer information in one place, making it easier for marketers to create audience segments. That’s because SCV gives them precise data regarding their customers’ interests, purchase history, and more.

Companies can then use this information to better target their marketing campaigns. Better targeting often leads to higher customer engagement.

Further reading: The Best Customer Segmentation Examples for Digital Marketing

Improved marketing decisions

Having an SCV gives companies a complete, real-time understanding of their customers. The data is easy to access and put into the context of the customer journey. This helps companies make smarter marketing decisions. 

Related: What is a CRM Database? How They Work and How to Choose One

Although using a single customer view has clear benefits, it’s not always easy to put into practice. Here are a few common pitfalls when it comes to SCV.

Inconsistent data quality

One issue with SCV is incomplete or inaccurate data. If you don’t connect all of your data streams to your SCV, you won’t have a full view of the customer journey. That makes it harder to optimize your marketing strategy, from allocating your budget to targeting your campaigns.

Lack of information due to data silos

Siloed data is a common hurdle for creating an SCV. This often means the data comes from only one source and isn’t shared across teams. SCV solves this issue by unifying the different data points in one easy-to-use record.

Existing legacy systems

Legacy systems (outdated programs) can prevent companies from using the data at their disposal to create an SCV. This is because of factors like outdated processes and data silos, which slow down or prevent data integration.

Compliance with data privacy laws

Data privacy laws such as the GDPR and CCPA might make it harder to create an SCV. This is because customers need to first consent to sharing their data. But with the right data collection processes, you can build an SCV while staying compliant with privacy regulations.

Here are the three main steps for creating a single customer view:

• Identify and merge data. First, decide which data sources to feed into the SCV. This might include demographics, purchase history, customer behavior, and more.
• Determine customer profiles. Customer identity resolution aligns identifiers such as email and IP addresses with other data sets to create a single profile for each customer. Brevo makes this easy by storing contact data and interaction history in a single record.
• Share access and establish use cases. Give the right teams across your company access to the customer records. Decide when to use the SCV and how.

Related: The 8 Best CRM Software for Small Business

SCV can be a game changer for your marketing strategy. Here are a few examples of common SCV use cases:

• Personalized content and marketing campaigns
• Social media ad optimization
• Cross-selling and upselling
• Identifying customers for loyalty programs
• Abandoned cart email reminders
• Lifecycle marketing, from awareness to retention
• Enhancing customer support and sales processes

Get started with single customer view

Having a single customer view is key to understanding your customers and providing an unforgettable user experience. SCV also helps you work more efficiently and save valuable resources.

With Brevo’s approachable CRM suite, it’s effortless to get started with SCV. All customer data can be found on the contact profile page, including a comprehensive interaction timeline that you can share across your company.

Ready to get started? Try Brevo’s sales solutions today.

Get started with Brevo's sales solutions

About the author, ready to grow with brevo, featured articles.

What is Email Marketing and How to Do It Right

11 Best Email Marketing Platforms for Small Business (2024)

How to Create a Newsletter in 9 Easy Steps (Completely Free)

11 Best Mailchimp Alternatives Compared (2024): Make the Switch

11 Best WhatsApp Marketing Software to Send Bulk Messages (2024)

Get Free Email Templates: HTML, Responsive and Customizable

Sign up for our newsletter.

• Awards and Recognition
• Board of Directors
• Client Stories
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
• Protecting Our Planet
• Enabling People to Outperform
• Caring for Our Communities
• Ethics, Integrity and Compliance
• Delivering Value to Our Clients
• From the CEO
• South Africa
• United States
• The Philippines
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• Management Team
• Press Releases
• WNS in the News
• Our Proposition
• Vision and Mission
• Generative AI
• ESG Analytics
• Augmented Data Management and Data Governance
• BI & Visualization
• Big Data Engineering
• Data Governance Intelligent Cloud
• Data Sciences
• Embedded Analytics
• Fraud And Risk Analytics
• HR Data Analytics
• Customer Loyalty Analytics
• Marketing Analytics Services
• Insurance Analytics
• Retail Media
• Centers of Excellence
• Customer Experience Consulting
• HIFFI – Home Insurance in a Jiffy
• Digitally Simulated Training Environment
• WNS Open Talent
• Decision Support
• Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)
• AIntegrated OneFinance Solution
• CFO Advisory Services
• WNS Duplicate Invoice Detector
• WNS Forecaster and Predictor
• WNS Journal Entry Analytics
• WNS Risk and Audit Analytics
• WNS Working Capital Analytics
• Outperforming CFO Framework (OCF)
• Procure-to-Pay (P2P)
• Quote-to-Sustain (QtS)
• WNS TRAC eClose
• Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer
• Financial Crime
• Fraud and Risk Analytics
• Fraud Management Services
• Regulatory Compliance and Risk Reporting
• Third-Party Risk Management
• Compensation
• HR Analytics
• Learning and Performance Management
• Payroll Administration
• Recruitment Services
• Workforce Management
• Legal Services
• Category Management
• Contracting Services
• Digital Solutions
• Procure-To-Pay Services
• Sourcing Services
• Supplier Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Robotics & Digital Automation TRAC
• Supplier Portal
• Technology Services
• WNS IP Labs
• Insurance TRAC
• RPA & Intelligent Automation TRAC
• Security TRAC
• Travel TRAC
• Analytics Incubation Center
• Big Data Analytics
• Data Sciences Group
• Process Maturity Model
• Value Innovation Program
• WNS Transition
• Workforce And Productivity Management
• Industry Segments
• Capital Markets Operations
• Research and Analysis Services
• Trade Finance
• Financial Crime and Compliance (FCC)
• FinTech Services
• Mortgage Operations
• Retail Banking
• Banking Analytics
• Banking and Financial Services Consulting
• Credit Risk Management and Underwriting Services
• Customer Experience in BFS
• Finance & Accounting for Banks & Financial Institutions
• Governance, Risk and Compliance
• Model Risk Management
• Customer Acquisition and Customer Experience Management Services
• Driving Insight-led Decisions
• Realizing Your Energy and Utility Digital Transformation Goals
• Carbon Accounting
• Digital Customer Experience Services
• Digital Meter-to-Cash
• Smart Collection and Debt Management Services
• Elevating Business Operations with Shared Services
• Customer Management Services
• Energy & Utilities Analytics
• Shared Services
• Customer Analytics
• Data Management
• Revenue Assurance
• Risk Analytics
• Video and Voice AI Solution
• Benefits Administration
• Care Management
• Clinical Operations
• Healthcare Claims
• Medical Bill Review
• Member Engagement Services
• Provider Lifecycle Management
• Revenue Cycle Management
• Content and Information Publishers
• Executive Search Services
• Consumer Tech and Platforms
• Internet and Social Media
• ID and Background Verification Firms
• Legal Service Firms
• Real Estate Services
• Risk and Compliance Service Providers
• Design Services
• Hi-Tech & Professional Services Analytics
• Product Data Operations
• Revenue Operations
• Pension Risk Transfer
• Lloyd’s of London Market
• Claims Prevention
• Straight-through Processing (STP)
• Subrogation Services
• Insurance Finance & Accounting
• WNS Claims 360
• Voice AI Solution
• Finance and Accounting
• Procurement
• Research and Analytics
• Biostatistics
• Clinical Data Management
• Medical Affairs
• Pharmacovigilance
• Competitive Intelligence
• Forecasting
• Business Intelligence
• Marketing & Pricing Analytics
• Sales Analytics
• Commercial Assessment

Customer Experience

• Finance & Accounting
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• CPG & Retail Analytics
• Integrated Sales Order Management
• Forwarders and Brokers
• Safety and Compliance
• WNS Air Cargo Optimized Solutions Suite (ACOSS)
• WNS Document Verification Solution
• WNS Volume Surge Solution
• Hospitality Companies
• Online Travel Agencies
• Travel Management Companies
• Travel and Leisure Analytics
• WNS Ancillary Revenue Optimizer Suite
• WNS Post-booking Servicing Solution
• Verifare Plus
• WNS and HFS Research Travel and Hospitality Market Impact Report
• Private Equity
• WNS DESAiGN HUB

Perspectives

Enhancing Business Outcomes with Unified Customer View

21 november 2022.

A WNS Perspective

• A leading retailer struggled to achieve a unified customer view, as critical data resided in silos across scattered point-of-sale systems.
• The client also wanted to improve marketing and commercial decisions through analytics-led insights.
• WNS Analytics – our data, analytics and AI practice – co-created an analytics center of excellence to help the retailer realize the full potential of data and drive insights-led business outcomes.

This is our story of enabling a leading retailer to improve customer engagement, loyalty and basket sizes.

As we know…

Consumer expectations and buying behaviors are changing quickly, requiring retailers to evolve their strategies and operations accordingly. Thus, customer analytics can play a more significant role in business operations, helping explore opportunities to enhance customer experience at every touch point. With the rising cost of customer acquisition, retention and loyalty strategies have also become critical.

The challenge for the client was…

To better understand buying behaviors as customers shopped across different stores using various loyalty and tender cards. This resulted in important customer data such as demographic data, loyalty data and campaign response behavior residing in silos in dispersed Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, making a unified view of the customer inaccessible for insights-based decision-making.

The company also wanted to make better marketing and commercial decisions, as the strategies used for store assortment, campaigns and loyalty benefits were judgment-based. There needed to be a quantitative analysis of marketing and campaign performance, with improved visibility into changing customer needs.

Moreover, the company needed access to multi-skilled teams to roll out a data strategy and analytics practice that would function consistently and deliver business outcomes.

As the co-creation partner…

We leveraged Consulting , the consulting arm of WNS Analytics , to understand the client’s as-is process, identify the gaps and implement an end-to-end strategy. This led to the setting up of the analytics Center of Excellence (CoE) for the sales and marketing function, which helped achieve the following objectives:

Business analytics and insights: Provide actionable insights on shopper behavior, campaign performance and commercial impact

Data engineering: Create and maintain a data pipeline to capture 360-degree customer data with a self-serving model and dashboards

Advanced analytics: Use data science and statistical techniques to implement use cases such as customer segmentation, customer value prediction and churn prediction

Program management: Propose, prioritize and execute business use cases across all the above workstreams

The client achieved significant analytical milestones, including…

Creating a single customer ID for transactions across loyalty and payment cards

Creating a cloud-based 360-degree customer data repository that captured transactions, campaign responses, demographic data and loyalty data

Enabling self-serve analytics for business users

Providing analytics-based actionable insights into shopping baskets, loyalty and promotional offers, and campaign performance

Executing advanced analytics use cases for customer segmentation, next best offer, customer value prediction, churn prediction and cross-sell recommendations

Through systematic data-driven decisions, actionable insights and advanced decision support models, WNS helped the client realize the full power of data and achieve impactful business outcomes. These included:

Additional revenue of USD 478 Mn due to effective personalization

Significant reduction in promo spending

Increased sales due to accurate predictions, hyper-personalization and optimization strategies

About WNS Analytics:

WNS Analytics powers business growth and innovation for 120+ global companies with data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Driven by a specialized team of over 4000 analysts, data scientists and domain experts, WNS Analytics helps translate data into actionable insights for impactful decision-making. Built on the pillars of consulting ( Consulting ), future-ready platforms ( AI Platforms ), and domain and technology ( Centers of Excellence ), WNS Analytics seamlessly blends strategy, industry-specific nuances, AI and Machine Learning (ML) operations, and intelligent cloud platforms.

Driving a futuristic edge are WNS Analytics modular cloud-based platforms and solutions leveraging advanced AI and ML to provide end-to-end integration and processing of data to actionable insights. WNS Analytics leverages the combined strength of WNS’ domain expertise, co-creation labs, strategic partnerships and outcome-based engagement models.

Join the conversation

Related To:

Similar perspectives, key holiday shopping trends 2022 for retail success.

25 November 2022

Re-imagining Customer Loyalty: Insights from the CX Retail…

09 August 2023

Investing in User Experience Makes Business Sense

24 January 2022

September 5, 2023

Understanding Single Customer View in 2023: The Essential Guide for Modern Customer Engagement

In our age of digital interactions, businesses have access to an overwhelming amount of data concerning their customers. This data emerges from various sources such as website interactions, social media engagements, email communications, and direct purchases.

The compelling challenge is: How can a company harness all this fragmented data to truly understand its customers? The answer lies in the concept of the Single Customer View (SCV).

What is Single Customer View?

Single Customer View (SCV) is a unified record of a customer's interactions across multiple channels. It merges purchase records, website activities, email interactions, and more into one single view. With SCV, data isn’t just collected—it's refined, making it easier for businesses to make decisions which strengthen their bond with customers.

Elements of a Comprehensive Single Customer View

To understand the depth of the SCV, it's essential to examine what it encompasses:

• Personal Info: This includes the customer's primary details—name, address, email, and phone. Such basic data is essential for businesses wanting to establish clear communication channels and design customer-centric experiences.
• Demographics: Incorporating details like age, gender, location, and income level, demographic information provides businesses with a snapshot of a customer's profile and interests. This supports refined marketing strategies and a better understanding of target audiences.
• Purchase History: This includes each transaction made by the customer—itemising what was bought, the purchase date, and the price point. By analysing this, businesses can identify consumer patterns, anticipate needs, and tailor future product or service offerings.
• Online Behaviour: This sheds light on a customer's digital activities, ranging from overall site interactions to specific actions, like viewing products or adding them to a wish list. Such insights equip businesses to refine their digital platforms, to offer a more intuitive and engaging user experience.
• Brand Interactions: Cataloguing every interaction between the customer and the brand—from customer service inquiries to feedback on promotional campaigns—this data is instrumental for businesses to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty, and also to discover areas for potential enhancement.

SCV’s Role in Today’s Business World

SCV is more than just a tool; it's changing the way businesses connect with their customers. The key benefits of having a single view of each customer include:

• Personalised Customer Experiences By tracking every interaction a customer has with a brand, businesses can accurately tailor their offerings. This approach strengthens brand loyalty and converts occasional buyers into regular customers.
• Efficient Marketing Campaigns Using the insights from SCV, businesses can design marketing campaigns that truly resonate with their audience. This focused approach increases marketing effectiveness by avoiding tactics that don't deliver a good return.
• Enhanced Customer Service Understanding a customer's history allows support teams to address issues quickly and more effectively. This responsive service leads to increased customer satisfaction and reduces turnover.
• Informed Decision-Making SCV provides businesses with clear insights into market trends, highlighting top-performing products and successful marketing strategies. With this knowledge, businesses can pursue new opportunities and meet customer needs more effectively.
• Data Accuracy SCV helps in organising and cleaning up data, ensuring businesses have reliable information for decision-making.

Crafting an Effective Single Customer View

Harnessing the full potential of customer data is absolutely crucial for any business aiming to stay ahead. Here's a step-by-step guide to building a robust Single Customer View:

Step 1. Gather All Customer Data

• Source Tracking: Identify every system that is capturing customer information, including CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and website analytics.
• Data Retrieval: Pull customer details from these platforms, focusing on demographics, purchase records, interactions, and preferences.

Step 2. Clean and Merge Data

• Data Consolidation: Combine the gathered data into one system, ensuring compatibility.
• Data Refinement: Rectify mistakes, eliminate duplicates, and complete any incomplete records to ensure data quality.

Step 3. Analyse the Data

• Pattern Detection: Utilise tools to learn recurring behaviours, preferences, and trends among customers.
• Segmentation: Categorise customers based on the identified patterns to enhance targeting and engagement.

Step 4. Make Informed Decisions

• Strategy Development: Create marketing campaigns or product enhancements tailored to specific customer groups based on the analysis.
• Feedback Loop: Regularly assess the outcomes of these initiatives, making adjustments as necessary to maintain an ongoing cycle of improvement.

Examples of SCV in action

SCV's utility isn't industry-specific; its advantages are universally applicable:

Utilising SCV, game developers can capture a player's in-game behaviour, preferences, and purchase history. This enables them to offer personalised content, game recommendations, and promotions that align with the player's interests and gameplay style.

By understanding individual behaviours, online platforms can offer precise product suggestions, timely deals, and promotions tailored to users' preferences.

SCV: The Cornerstone of Modern Customer Engagement

In today's dynamic environment, where consumer expectations can be changeable, SCV stands as a stable guide. While its implementation may be somewhat complex, the resulting depth of understanding and enhanced relationship-building capacity is invaluable for businesses.

To gain further insights into how SCV can elevate your customer engagement and drive business progress, reach out to our expert consultants at Engagement Lab today!

Smartphone Market Trends in Asia 2024: Consumer Behavior and Industry Insights

Analyzing Asia’s Online Shopping Trends: Consumer Behavior and Market Changes

Trends in the Asian Retail Market: Robust Consumption in Indonesia, Uncertain Outlook in Japan

• Book a meeting

Popular topics

• People-Based Marketing
• Meet-a-LiveIntenter
• Email Revenue
• Identity Graph
• Subscriber Acquisition
• First-Party Data
• Direct-to-Consumer
• Cookie Apocalypse

Single customer view: What is it and why does it matter?

• Identity Resolution

Victoria de Leon

What is a single customer view.

A single customer view, also known as a 360-degree view of the customer or a unified customer view, is a comprehensive collection of data gathered from various channels that’s connected to one individual. It provides a cohesive overview of customer behaviors, so you can better understand what your audiences need and how to engage them with personalized experiences.

A single customer view includes, but is not limited to, first-party data collected from the following sources:

• Mobile apps
• Email subscriptions
• Brick and mortar stores
• Social networks
• Customer support teams

Why does it matter?

Google ran a study to see how many channels a woman used to buy a pair of jeans. The result? She conducted research for 73 days and interacted with more than 250 touch points — including blogs, YouTube videos, and retailer sites — before finally making a purchase. Still, this isn’t a unique experience. According to Google, buyers can spread their path to purchase across 500 touch points or more.

Without it, the people who engage with these touch points and the resulting data points exist as separate identities and disconnected data points across several platforms, apps, and databases. Without a unified customer view, businesses cannot efficiently and effectively market their products and services to their existing and prospective customers.

However, with a unified customer view, businesses can reconcile all these data points into one unified identity — creating a complete picture and understanding of their individual consumers or a single customer view. Let’s explore this further.

What are the benefits of a single customer view?

A unified customer view can be the foundation of a solid and efficient marketing strategy. With a single customer view to guide them, businesses can:

• Personalize marketing campaigns across channels and platforms: Reach your audience on their preferred channels with their consent, like email or SMS, and meet them on their favorite platforms with messaging that speaks to their interests and needs.
• Break down silos between teams. Departments across an organization can easily access the same customer data from one place to inform strategies.
• Reduce duplicate and low-quality data. By storing data in one centralized platform, it’s easier for businesses to organize, clean, and keep data up to date.
• Create unique audience segments. Build and target specific groups of customers based on demographics, behaviors, content preferences, and stages of the buyer journey.
• Improve customer service. With a clear view of each customer’s interactions and habits, support reps can better deliver value at each touchpoint and anticipate people’s needs.
• Improve measurement and attribution. It enables businesses to more accurately measure the impact of their marketing and advertising efforts on their revenue.
• Optimize advertising spend. With improved measurement and attribution, businesses can optimize their advertising spend or even redistribute their budgets to channels, formats, or approaches that move the needle on their business.

How does identity resolution help?

Identity resolution is the process of matching specific identifiers — like email addresses, device IDs, and usernames — to individual customers. It is what makes a single customer view possible.

Identity resolution is complicated now that customers are using more devices than ever . Furthermore, Google is phasing out third-party cookies which businesses long for relied on identity and retargeting. That’s why identity resolution is critical to creating a single customer view. With identity resolution, you gain the necessary data to build a comprehensive understanding of each customer, attributing information from different platforms to individual people.

How can you create a single customer view?

Creating a single customer view isn’t so hard if you have the right tools and strategies at your disposal.

To get started, you can:

• Collect customer data across platforms. You can use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to gather and sync data from each customer touchpoint.
• Integrate data from legacy systems. Don’t forget to include data from channels that aren’t connected to your CDP. This might include your call center or an outdated marketing cloud, for instance.
• Build an identity graph. An identity graph combines anonymous and known customer data for identity resolution. LiveIntent’s proprietary identity graph, for instance, pulls from millions of unique data points to turn anonymous website traffic into authenticated customer data.

Your business needs a unified customer view

Even if your business doesn’t sell jeans, chances are your customers use a range of channels, devices, and touch points along their path to purchase. So if you want to engage them, you need a way to gather and manage all that data in one place. Only with a single customer view can you truly understand how your customers behave and how teams across your organization can reach them with high-quality, personalized experiences.

If you’d like to know more about building a single customer view, how it can help with segmentation and its relationship to identity resolution, check out our identity resolution content .

Learn more about Identity Resolution

Part 2: Interoperability is the key to publishers thriving in the third-party cookieless era of Universal ID 2.0

Part 1: Interoperability is the key to publishers thriving in the third-party cookieless era of Universal ID 2.0

How Brad’s Deals revitalized their revenue stream with Email Reactivation

Upcoming Webinar

Join us for a FREE Webinar on Automating Healthcare Document Processing with AI

October 2, 2024 — 11 am PT / 1 pm CT / 2 pm ET

Home / Blogs / Delivering Personalized Experiences with a Single Customer View

The Automated, No-Code Data Stack

Learn how Astera Data Stack can simplify and streamline your enterprise’s data management.

Delivering Personalized Experiences with a Single Customer View

Product Marketer

Every interaction a customer has with a business, be it an online purchase, a visit to a physical store, a customer service call, or a social media engagement, is a valuable piece of a larger puzzle. Individually, these pieces provide a fragmented understanding of the customer’s story. But the true value lies in assembling these pieces together to reveal the complete picture.  

A Single Customer View (SCV) is a consolidated, holistic view of each customer which integrates data from various touchpoints. It’s the key to unlocking the full potential of customer data, driving effective customer engagement, and maintaining a competitive edge in an increasingly customer-centric market.  

What is a Single Customer View?  

A Single Customer View (SCV) is a comprehensive view of customer data across all interactions and touchpoints with a business or organization. It brings together information from various sources, channels, and departments within an organization to create a cohesive and accurate profile of an individual customer.  

The primary objective of a Single Customer View is to provide businesses with a complete understanding of their customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviors. This enables businesses to deliver personalized customer experiences, improve customer satisfaction, and enhance customer loyalty. Furthermore, an SCV aids in making informed business decisions, optimizing marketing strategies, and identifying opportunities for cross-selling and up-selling.  

Essentially, SCV is creating a unified and centralized snapshot of a customer’s interactions with a company.  

Types of Customer Data Collected in a Single Customer View  

Customer data comes from diverse sources, each providing unique insights into customer interactions and behaviors. The consolidation of these key data sources from various channels contributes to a comprehensive understanding of individual customers. The key types of customer data typically include:  

• Transactional Data: Information about the customer’s purchases, transactions, and order history, such as product details, quantity, price, and date of purchase. This data helps businesses understand what products or services the customer has bought and their spending patterns.   
• Interaction Data: Details about the customer’s interactions with the business across different channels. This may include website visits, social media interactions, emails, and other forms of engagement. Understanding how a customer interacts with the company helps tailor communication and marketing strategies.  
• Demographic Information: Basic personal details such as the customer’s name, address, contact information, age, gender, and other relevant demographic data. This information provides a foundational understanding of who the customer is.  
• Preferences and Behavior: Insights into the customer’s preferences, behaviors, and choices. This data may include product preferences, communication channels, and specific interests. Understanding customer preferences enables businesses to offer more personalized experiences.   
• Customer Service History: Records of the customer’s interactions with customer support, including inquiries, issues raised, and resolutions provided. This data helps improve customer service and ensures a consistent and positive experience.  
• Feedback and Reviews: Information on customer opinions, including feedback surveys, ratings, and reviews. This data may include comments, ratings on a scale, and testimonials. It is valuable for sentiment analysis, identifying areas for improvement, and shaping future interactions.  
• Marketing Responses: Data on how customers respond to marketing efforts, including metrics like open rates for emails, click-through rates on advertisements, and conversion rates from promotional campaigns. Understanding how customers engage with marketing efforts helps refine future campaigns for better effectiveness.   
• Social Media Data: Insights from the customer’s social media presence include data such as the number of followers, engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments), and information from linked social media profiles. This provides insights into the customer’s online presence and can be valuable for targeted marketing and engagement strategies.  

Benefits of Single Customer View  

Building a SCV transforms the way organizations operate, reducing costs, saving time, and elevating profitability. Let’s explore how SCV streamlines processes and enhances outcomes for the benefit of businesses and all stakeholders involved.  

• Personalized and Targeted Marketing:  

A 360-degree customer view, enriched with insights into preferences, behaviors, and historical interactions, empowers marketers to create highly personalized campaigns. By segmenting customers based on specific criteria and updating profiles in real-time, businesses tailor content to meet unique needs. Customers are more likely to respond positively to messaging that resonates with their specific preferences, contributing to overall profitability, as affirmed by 90% of top marketers .  

• Improved Audience Segmentation:  

By consolidating data from diverse sources into a centralized repository, SCV creates a comprehensive and up-to-date profile for each customer. This 360-degree customer view allows businesses to categorize their customer base into distinct segments based on various criteria such as demographics, behavior, and preferences. Marketers can leverage this segmentation to create more focused and relevant campaigns for specific customer segments. Precision in targeting ensures that messages reach the right audience, optimizing marketing spend and improving overall effectiveness of marketing efforts.  

• Enhanced Cross-Sell and Upsell Opportunities:  

The ability to identify and capitalize on cross-sell and upsell opportunities is a valuable outcome of a unified view of a customer’s interactions, purchases, and preferences. By understanding the customer’s history, businesses can strategically recommend products that the customer typically purchases together, leading to increased average transaction values. Leveraging insights gained from customer history for cross-selling and upselling contributes to maximizing the lifetime value of each customer, as businesses can tailor their offerings based on a comprehensive understanding of individual customer needs.  

• Proactive Issue Resolution:  

A comprehensive customer view equips customer support teams with a holistic perspective of a customer’s history and interactions across channels. This insight allows organizations to identify potential issues before they escalate and take preemptive measures to address concerns. Anticipating customer needs and resolving issues promptly enhances overall customer satisfaction. Quick and proactive issue resolution mitigates potential negative experiences and contributes to positive brand perception, fostering customer loyalty and retention.  

• Customer Journey Optimization:  

Understanding the complete customer journey is essential for effective marketing. SCV provides insights into every touchpoint and interaction a customer has with the brand. Marketers can use this information to map out and optimize the entire customer journey, ensuring a seamless and engaging experience. This optimization contributes to increased customer satisfaction and loyalty as customers move smoothly through each phase of their interactions with the brand.  

How to Create a Unified Customer View  

The following steps outline the process of creating a unified customer view, providing a roadmap for businesses to effectively consolidate and leverage their customer data. Each step plays a critical role in ensuring the accuracy, completeness, and usability of the customer profile.  

Data Collection:  

The first step is data collection, which involves gathering customer data from various sources. These sources could include sales records, website interactions, customer service communications, and customer surveys. The goal is to capture a wide range of data that reflects all aspects of the customer’s interactions and experiences with your business.  

Data Integration:  

The next step involves consolidating data from different sources and channels into a single source of truth . The aim of data integration is to create a unified, coherent set of data that provides a comprehensive view of each customer. This process may involve cleansing data to remove errors or inconsistencies and transforming data to convert it into a common format that can be easily analyzed and interpreted.  

Identity Resolution:  

Identity resolution refers to linking various identifiers like email addresses or phone numbers to create a singular customer profile. This process ensures that data from different interactions is correctly attributed to the same customer, providing a comprehensive, rather than disjointed view of their behavior. The goal is to ensure that all data points related to a single customer are connected, providing a complete picture of that customer’s interactions with your business.  

Create a Centralized Customer Database:  

This step involves establishing a centralized repository or database for storing unified customer data. Various platforms can be leveraged for this purpose, including traditional relational databases, modern NoSQL databases, data warehouses, or cloud-based storage solutions. The choice of platform depends on factors such as data volume, real-time processing needs, security requirements, and budget. It is important to ensure that the database’s structure facilitates easy access and efficient data analysis.  

Share Data Across the Organization:  

The final step is to share the data across the organization in a secure and compliant manner. This involves making the central customer data hub accessible to all relevant departments within your business, such as sales, marketing, customer service, and product development. By having access to the unified customer view, teams can gain a better understanding of the customers. This helps them to tailor their strategies based on the insights gained from the data and work together to provide a consistent and personalized customer experience.   

Conclusion  

As enterprises navigate through ever-evolving customer needs and preferences, the importance of building a SCV becomes increasingly evident. It serves as a strategic tool, consolidating data from various touchpoints to provide a summary of each customer’s journey. This holistic understanding enables businesses to create experiences that resonate with customers, making them feel valued and understood.  

In this context, solutions like Astera, with its advanced data integration and management capabilities, are instrumental. It aids in creating an effective SCV, allowing businesses to seamlessly consolidate and analyze customer data. This empowers businesses to deliver personalized experiences, fostering customer loyalty and driving growth. Download our eBook now and take a step towards a customer-centric approach.  

You MAY ALSO LIKE

Data Mesh vs. Data Fabric: How to Choose the Right Data Strategy for Your Organization

Implementing a modern, integrated data architecture can help you break down data silos, which cause C-suite decision-makers to lose 12...

A Comprehensive Guide to Workflow Automation

What is Workflow Automation? Workflow automation involves automating repetitive tasks and processes in a sequence using technology, reducing the need...

Data Migration Challenges: Strategies for a Smooth Transition

Smooth and effective data migration helps organizations move data across systems efficiently to maintain their competitive advantage. Still, Gartner reports...

Considering Astera For Your Data Management Needs?

Establish code-free connectivity with your enterprise applications, databases, and cloud applications to integrate all your data.

• Help Center

A single customer view: what it is & how it works

A single view of the customer puts all different pieces of customer information together into one coherent, up-to-date whole for your entire organization.

In an old Indian parable, several blind men get to touch an elephant. Each man feels a different part of the animal. Afterward, they each describe the elephant, but their accounts vary, depending on what they touched—the tusk, tail, or perhaps a leg. They get confused and angry with each other because of the discrepancies in their description, but eventually learn that the elephant is a large animal with many parts. All their stories are true. Each just forms one piece of the whole.

Departments in many organizations have a similarly fragmented understanding of their customers. Ninety percent of people now travel across different devices and touchpoints to complete a task and generate lots of data along the way. Legacy systems like CRMs often can't process and sync this information in real-time in a central location. So it's as if teams face a herd of elephants and rely on an intermediary to touch one of them. They then need to decipher secondhand stories to figure out what part of which elephant they're dealing with and whether the animal ran off in the meantime.

A single view of the customer resolves this situation. It puts all the different pieces of customer information together into one coherent, up-to-date whole. To show you how to implement such a view within your organization, we'll discuss:

What is a single customer view?

What are the benefits of having a single customer view, four obstacles to creating a single customer view, how to create a unified customer view.

What a unified customer view looks like in Segment

FAQs about the single customer view

A single customer view means you have one location for every individual you do business with that provides an overview of all the data you’ve collected on them. Usually, this view takes the form of a profile page in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system.

You need to capture customer data in real time across all your channels and internal systems to create a single customer view. This information can come from sources like your website, in-store sales transactions, marketing tools, social media channels, and customer service interactions. Once collected, you need to clean, synthesize, and store this data in a central location, where every team and tool can instantly access it without the involvement of engineers or analysts.

The single customer view should sit at the heart of your business. It gives all departments valuable information to improve their performance. Executives, for example, have more accurate data to make decisions, marketers to deliver more profitable campaigns, and customer support agents to solve issues faster.

Deliver truly personalized marketing across channels

You can only deliver personalization based on data that's up to date and relevant. If it's not, your message, offer, or recommendation will confuse or annoy your customers (like a discount coupon for a product someone purchased yesterday at full price).

With one accurate view of each customer updated in real time, you can confidently use the data you have about them to tailor your marketing efforts to each individual. It prevents marketers from working with outdated data or different departments working with their own incomplete view of each customer.

By providing the right message at the right time at every stage in the customer journey, you make customers feel like you know and understand them, which leads to higher loyalty and increased lifetime value (LTV).

Source: 2021 State of Personalization report

Access customer data instantly across the organization

With a unified customer view, everyone in your company knows where to look for and store customer data. This capability eliminates wasted time chasing down and verifying information, making the data more useful for the entire organization.

When, for example, someone in a meeting needs information on a customer to make a point or a decision, they can do so quickly and trust the data they're looking at is correct and up to date.

Understand customers through finer segmentation and analytics

A single view of the customer ensures customers get classified correctly and allows more specific classification over time. Your team knows, for example, "John desktop" is the same person as "John mobile" and can synthesize this data, something that's not possible without a unified customer view.

Imagine segmentation as putting labels on customers—and sometimes removing them—as you get to know them. This process might start with a label for "prospect" when they visit your website for the first time, which gets replaced with one for "customer" once they make a purchase on mobile. Over time, these individuals might get labels for "high-value client," "abandoned a shopping cart," and "interested in sneakers."

Teams across your company use these labels to group people, so they can analyze their behavior, attribute marketing campaigns, and provide tailored communications, offers, services, and recommendations.

Provide first-class customer service

A single view of the customer gives support agents the information they need to quickly or even proactively address customer needs. They can see someone's actions and previous interactions in one place, up to date to the current minute.

Say that a customer reaches out to support through live chat on your website. The unified customer view shows they got stuck filling out a contact form and which products they looked at beforehand. Your agent can use this information to immediately provide a solution or special offer without any additional input from the customer.

Unifying your customer view across the organization is an endeavor that requires a plan and the involvement of many people to overcome four major obstacles.

Remember the parable from the intro? Each team within your organization represents one of the men touching only one part of the elephant. Your analytics team might have a piece of customer info stored in the product database, marketing in your social media management platform, sales in their CRM, and customer service in the support ticketing system.

Every team has its own silo of data and processes it in a unique way. Nobody can see the whole or even agree on who's data is correct. Exchanging information between departments is difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes impossible.

Inaccurate or inconsistent data

With customer information scattered across the organization, several issues arise as data can become:

Duplicated: Multiple records for the same customer exist in different departments.

Disconnected: Data from different parts of the organization can't be linked and synchronized or only with great effort.

Decayed: Information like email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles become outdated if they're not verified and updated often.

Distrusted: Not all sources are created equal. An email address that went through a double opt-in procedure is more reliable than one entered manually into a CRM by a salesperson. But how to tell the difference without a single, central synchronization process?

Compliance and privacy concerns

You need to ask yourself whether you're legally allowed to store, process, and use every piece of customer information your company collects. Since both the amount of data and privacy regulations are multiplying, this question becomes even harder to address. In fact, others, like consumers or regulators, now also have the right to ask you questions about your data collection practices.

How can an organization hope to begin answering such requests if their own departments don't know who's collecting what information or which piece of data is the most up to date?

Legacy technical infrastructure

Many companies still rely on equipment and tools that can't deliver a single customer view, even though they collect plenty of data across the organization. These companies' internal systems might not connect to each other, or information is stored in incompatible formats by different teams.

This situation often arises when companies rely on their CRM as the backbone of their customer information. CRMs can’t capture a complete set of data from many channels, keep it up-to-date in real time, and connect it to the tools where employees need it.

A CDP like Segment with identity resolution software can resolve this situation. It's built for this central role and can standardize and synthesize data from all corners of the organization. The CRM can still serve its purpose for sales and, sometimes, marketing teams by exchanging its information with the CDP.

You can build a single customer view using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to capture customer data across all the platforms, touchpoints, and tools you use. The CDP can clean, standardize, and centralize all this information and make it available across teams (without the help of engineers or analysts).

Collect data from different tools and sources

You can collect the information you need to build a single customer view by connecting data sources to your CDP using Segment Connections . Segment supports hundreds of tools that you can set up with a few clicks. You can link other properties like your website or iOS app by copying and pasting ready-made scripts.

The type of data that makes up a single customer view is different for each organization. The information you collect depends on the channels and tools you use and the available infrastructure and expertise.

Here's a list of typical data companies might feed into a single customer view:

Personal details and contact information

Website and mobile app activity

Product usage data

Purchase history

Point of sales (PoS) and transactional data

Customer support interactions

Demographics

Customer preferences

Marketing campaign data

Resolve customer identities using a CDP

You need to combine all the data you collect into one customer profile through identity resolution that compares identifiers like email addresses, login data, and IP numbers. This process helps you reconcile anonymous or ambiguous data with known visitor information to get more complete customer profiles. A CDP like Segment can automatically do most of this work. You can insert it into your existing processes and systems quickly and without much disruption.

Segment also standardizes all the information you collect through automated tracking plans and a privacy portal , so you ensure high-quality data and compliance with privacy regulations. It then uses the Personas feature to present all this information to you in a single customer view.

Make the synthesized data available across the organization

Segment makes it easy for teams to connect Destinations, which are endpoints for the customer data coming out of your CDP. This feature enables anyone to link their favorite tools and platforms or try out new ones.

Destinations also sync back any new information or changes to Segment, ensuring you keep your centralized data—and hence your single view of the customer—up to date across the organization.

The State of Personalization 2023

Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.

Frequently asked questions

### what does the term single customer view mean.

A single customer view means having one central location for every individual you do business with that provides an overview of all the data you’ve collected on them.

### How do you build a single customer view?

You can create a single customer view with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Segment, which captures customer data across all your platforms, touchpoints, and tools. The CDP can then clean, standardize, and centralize all this information and make it available to all your teams. They can easily connect to the CDP and use this customer information without the help of engineers or analysts.

### Why is it important to implement a single customer view?

A unified customer view enables organizations to deliver truly personalized and effective marketing, plus first-class, proactive customer service. It also provides every team with accessible, fully up-to-date customer information, which facilitates better decision-making and reduces time spent searching for information. Legally, a single customer view has also become a must-have, as complying with privacy regulations is virtually impossible without one.

Recommended articles

Want to keep updated on segment launches, events, and updates.

We’ll share a copy of this guide and send you content and updates about Twilio Segment’s products as we continue to build the world’s leading CDP. We use your information according to our  privacy policy . You can update your preferences at any time.

Thank you for subscribing!

Case Study: Single customer view: keeping it clean

Many would agree that keeping existing customers happy and loyal is one of the toughest challenges businesses face during the recession. Holding accurate data will do a lot to help this and allows businesses to communicate relevant information that will maintain interest. However, failure to keep up-to-date records will only result in time wasted on poorly targeted outreach.

Just collating everything you know about a customer is not enough. Customers will only listen if the information they receive is timely and relevant to their preferences. A true single customer view will help make this happen, but can only be achieved when a documented data quality strategy is in place that has suppressed outdated information and removes duplicate records. Whether data has been captured online, face to face or over the phone in call centres, you will need to identify where incorrect or duplicate information exists, and clean your data records accordingly. A single spring clean is not an option, as databases that are left to decay will be subject to contacts that have changed address, passed away or registered with the mailing preference service.

Building a single customer view will not only have great benefits in terms of saving the customer from duplicate mailings, but will also help marketers improve ROI on their marketing campaigns by using accurate insight on where resource should be allocated. A single customer view will also boost a brand’s green credentials, safe in the knowledge that the communication it dispatches will be far more likely to reach a willing recipient rather than be put in the bin before being read.

Experian QAS offers a number of products and services to make sure organisations’ contact data is correct and helps maintains a single customer view. We’re helping our customers suppress unwanted records from their marketing databases and prevent the entry of duplicate records into their database, saving them from having to remove these manually.

Adopting steps such as these will allow your organisation to hold a single customer view based on better managed data across the organisation, refining contact data into real up-sell and cross sell opportunities and keeping prospects’ records accurate.

Latest from Marketing Week

‘It’s old because it’s good, not good because it’s old’: Hovis’s first CMO on leading the brand

Hovis, which was founded in 1886, is a brand blessed with a “treasure chest” of distinctive assets, says new CMO Mark Brown. His job is to deploy these in relevant way to drive demand for the brand.

‘More informal, less stressful’: B2B marketers on opting for events to boost brand

B2B marketers see the value in using events to build customer relationships in a less pressured environment, although linking the message with social is proving popular.

Amex’s B2B travel marketing lead: ‘A tighter budget means we have to think differently, relentlessly’

With a focus on storytelling and alignment across the business, the American Express business has evolved its marketing strategy for a new generation of travellers.

Ocado launches retail media offering

Ocado Ads claims to offer advertisers a “unique” set of retail media solutions driven by its online-first operating model.

Search anything and hit ‘Enter’

• Marketing News
• Mark Ritson
• Helen Edwards
• Peter Weinberg & Jon Lombardo
• Helen James
• Richard Shotton
• Newsletters
• Festival of Marketing
• Knowledge Bank
• AI: Beyond the Hype
• Careers & Salaries
• Marketing Effectiveness
• Marketing Leadership
• Brand Positioning
• Customer Experience
• Design & Branding
• Market Research
• Price Strategy
• Product & Service Innovation
• Targeting & Segmentation
• Advertising
• Agency Relationships
• Content Marketing
• CRM & Loyalty
• Data & Analytics
• Influencer Marketing
• Programmatic Advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Sponsorship & Experiential
• Career Development
• Skills & Training
• John Lewis & Partners
• Marks & Spencer
• Procter & Gamble
• About Marketing Week
• Partner with us

Single Customer View

Centralize customer data from multiple touchpoints into one comprehensive view, enabling a deeper understanding of customer needs and behaviors, fostering a customer-centric approach across all business operations.

360-Degree Insights

A comprehensive view of each customer's interactions and behaviors.

Unified Customer Profiles

Behavioral data, customer data and transaction data all in a single profile

Real-Time Data Synchronization

Keep customer information up-to-date across all systems and touchpoints

Enable Customer-Centric Strategy with A Single Customer View

Enable your business to deeply understand and proactively meet customer needs. A single customer view is a core facet in driving personalized experiences, enhancing customer satisfaction, and fostersing long-term loyalty with a customer-centric approach.

Customer-Centric Decision Making: ‍ Base all business decisions on a deep, data-driven understanding of customer needs and preferences.

Strategic business growth: ‍ utilize customer insights to drive product development, marketing strategies, and business expansion plans., seamless customer experiences: ‍ ensure consistency across all channels, boosting customer satisfaction and loyalty..

Transform Your Business into A Customer-Centric Powerhouse

Harnessthe power of a Single Customer View, this holistic approach allows for more accurate targeting, improved service delivery, and a deeper connection with each customer, transforming every interaction into an opportunity for growth and engagement.

Solution Details

While each solution is meticulously tailored to meet the specific needs of our clients, the below highlights key areas where we can accelerate delivery and enhance outcomes.

Key Technologies

AWS, Google Cloud Platform - GCP, Microsoft Azure, Salesforce (SFDC), Snowflake.

Data Expertise

Data Integration, Data Quality Management, Data Governance, Database Management, Data Security, Data Analytics, Business Intelligence, Customer Relationship Management, Machine Learning/AI, ETL (Extract, Transform, Load)

Our Unique Approach

Every Now Vertical engagement has 4 key components which
ensure we maximize business value delivered from your data.

Data Governance & AI Ethics

Accelerated value realisation, vertical intelligence, value-first agile delivery.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

Case study: creating a single view of the customer for CRM strategy

2005, Interactive Marketing

Andrea Reid is a PhD candidate at the School of Management and Economics, Queens' University Belfast. Her research interests are relationship marketing, customer relationship management, SVC databases, the use of IT in marketing and marketers' trust of data held ...

Related Papers

EconStor Preprints

Edward Malthouse

Christos Sarmaniotis

Communications of the ACM

Supreet Kanwal

Atul Parvatiyar

Business Horizons

Anne Stringfellow

harikanth adem

Rolph Anderson

Tejas Yaduvanshi

Businesses have always been in a constant race to keep the current customers and poach the new ones, which is portrayed by the requirement for understanding customers more intently and respond to their desires unequivocally. One of the many sets of tools aimed at aiding the exchange between business and customer is Customer Relationship Management and its typologies, which can help the organization to build individual relationships with customers in such a way that both parties get the most out of the exchange. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functions as a set of practices that facilitates customer centricity and long-term business perspectives. CRM practices encompass four different but inter-related typologies; strategic, operational, analytical and collaborative. The paper aims to explore the typologies that host the cross-functional process of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and attempts to propose a framework for the same underlying typology’s context.Abstract Bu...

triaprilani s

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED PAPERS

dauglas martin

Business Process Management Journal

Ricardo França

Industrial Marketing Management

Danny Bellenger

Merlin Stone

Colloids and Surfaces A-physicochemical and Engineering Aspects

Sabina Kljajic

Journal of Relationship Marketing

Francis Buttle

Journal of Database Marketing

Peace Fiadzomor

Manisha Chawla

Mohamed Kabayare

Carla Figueiredo

Journal of Business Market Management

Pennie Frow

hajar aramoon

Think India

manpreet uppal

International Journal of E-Business Research

Pratap chandra Mandal

ton kuijlen

IRJET Journal

Journal of Systems and Software

R. Chalmeta

Stan Maklan

Andreas Zehetner

Moira K Clark

Emergent Strategies for E-Business Processes, Services, and Implications: Advancing Corporate

Keith Ward , Erik Rolland , Erik Rolland

Dilip Mutum

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Join our upcoming webinar to explore the latest trends and findings from our comprehensive State of Social Report spanning 347 brands across 8 sectors.

• · Brandwatch Academy
• Forrester Wave

Brandwatch Consumer Research

Formerly the Falcon suite

Formerly Paladin

Published August 2 nd 2018

The Single Customer View Explained and Why You Need One

We explain what a single customer view is and why you need to sort yours out as soon as possible.

The single customer view is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot. It’s a concept that’s relevant to nearly all areas of a business, and can help give clarity to data and shine a light on valuable customer insights.

What is a single customer view?

A single customer view is an aggregation of all data an organization has on a particular customer, presented to give a clear overview of that them and their specific data.

In other words, it allows you to create a profile of your customer so you can get a clear overview of where they are at in regards to your business.

What kind of data is included in a single customer view?

This will entirely depend on the data you collect on your customers and what’s really important to you. For a single customer view to be valuable, it needs to be set up to highlight what’s useful for those using it.

Contact details are great, but does a full address and phone number need to be front and center when you’re looking for their purchase history?

Think about what the single customer view is going to be used for and organize it around that.

You might like

6 ways to transform your marketing with integrated data, why do you need a single customer view.

There are a number of strong reasons for creating a single customer view. We’ve listed them below, but the underlying message is that data is more valuable when you bring together all of your sources in a useful way.

Improved targeting

Whether it’s a mailer or ads, getting targeting right can massively improve their chances of success. Having a detailed single customer view means you can better categorize them for targeting.

With a mix of all that data you can also create better categories that are more focused. Broad categories have their place, but being able to get hyper-specific has its own rewards too.

Improved customer experience

A single customer view should include all the communication a customer has had with your company. That’s everything from phone calls to tweets.

With all of this in one place it means when they get in touch in the future there are no missing pieces. Your customer service agent can get up to speed on everything quickly, meaning the customer doesn’t have to explain things for a second time.

For anyone who has dealt with a call centre before (i.e all of us), we know how much better that makes our experience.

Smoother internal processes

Need to find out the last product a customer bought? Or who owns the account? What about who they last spoke to and the outcome of that chat?

You can always chase this up by contacting relevant departments, but a single customer view should mean it’s all there already. No emails or phone calls – you can find everything you need without taking up more of your time.

This makes internal processes far speedier and can help you solve a customer’s query or problem faster too. Everyone’s happy.

Better attribution

What exactly were the steps a customer took to finally buy your product? With social media, PPC, traditional marketing, word of mouth and all other touch points playing their part, there’s an infinite amount of ways a person may finally hand over their cash.

With a single customer view that vital step can become much easier to figure out. By tracking interactions, whether it’s a few guide downloads after clicking a Google ad, or an email saying they were reminded about your service by a friend, having it all together means you can chart a journey.

As always, attribution is hard to get exact. But this can often bring steps on the buyer journey to light.

Understand and engage at the speed of social with the social suite built for our fast-moving world.

Brandwatch Vizia

Make better data decisions..

Bring all of your data sources into one view..

More in marketing

Social media content plan: what you need to succeed.

By Brandwatch Aug 27

Social Media Monitoring: Essential Strategies for Online Success

14 social media holidays to celebrate this september.

By Yasmin Pierre Aug 13

10 Social Listening Tools and Who They’re Best for

By Brandwatch Jul 14

We value your privacy

We use cookies to improve your experience and give you personalized content. Do you agree to our cookie policy?

By using our site you agree to our use of cookies — I Agree

Falcon.io is now part of Brandwatch. You're in the right place!

Existing customer? Log in to access your existing Falcon products and data via the login menu on the top right of the page. New customer? You'll find the former Falcon products under 'Social Media Management' if you go to 'Our Suite' in the navigation.

Paladin is now Influence. You're in the right place!

Brandwatch acquired Paladin in March 2022. It's now called Influence, which is part of Brandwatch's Social Media Management solution. Want to access your Paladin account? Use the login menu at the top right corner.

Single customer view

Key Takeaways:

• A single customer view is a compilation of everything a company knows about a specific customer or prospect, gleaned from the broadest range of touchpoints possible and consolidated into a single database record.
• Single customer views are key to cross-channel marketing campaigns because they enable marketers to understand not just whom they’re targeting but their preferences and behavior throughout the buyer journey.
• An enterprise data warehouse that connects to each data source is the ideal way to overcome data silos and aggregate customer data into a single customer view.
• A composable customer data platform that sits on top of that data warehouse is the best way to activate that data for personalized campaigns and buyer experiences.

Table of Contents

What is a single customer view.

A “single customer view,” or SCV, is a compilation of everything a company knows about a specific customer or prospect, gleaned from the broadest range of touchpoints possible. 

Other terms for “single customer view” include:

• Unified customer view
• Unified customer profile
• Golden profile
• 360-degree view or 360-degree customer view
• Full-view user data
• Customer 360

All these terms refer to the attempt to gather as much data on every individual customer and prospect as possible and consolidate it in a single profile or database record. The purpose of a single customer view is to provide a team with a deep understanding of the needs, habits, and intentions of your prospects and customers.

The touchpoints for building an single customer view include: 

• Marketing channels used to reach out to the customer
• How the customer purchases and interacts with a company’s product
• A company’s one-to-one interactions with each customer 

As marketing channels, customer touchpoints, and data sources multiply, creating a single customer view has become more challenging: Having so much data on so many customers can be difficult to parse, especially when it’s scattered across multiple platforms.  

To organize and consolidate large amounts of customer data, organizations often create a single customer view within a customer data platform (CDP) or in an enterprise-wide cloud-based data warehouse , with a single record for each customer.

Single customer views and targeted marketing

While SCV profiles are used to build audiences for marketing campaigns, their granularity also makes hyper-personalized marketing possible. With information on each customer’s purchasing, content, and marketing channel preferences, teams can customize customer journeys , messaging, service, and product recommendations by individual. 

Technologies like tracking pixels and geo-location make it possible to update single customer views and execute hyper-personalized advertising in real-time. By leveraging machine learning with single customer views, it’s now possible to predict a customer’s future shopping preferences and behavior and tailor marketing accordingly.

Where does the data in a single customer view come from?

Ideally, single customer views comprise information from every customer-facing channel, touchpoint, and interaction. They can include: 

• Website activity as collected in a back-end analytics platform
• Online activity, such as interaction with a brand’s social media channels and digital advertising
• In-store sales, self-checkout systems, and point-of-sales systems (POSs)
• Responses to omnichannel marketing campaigns, including emails and content downloads, driven by marketing automation platforms
• Interactions with sales or customer service teams recorded in customer relationship management platforms, or CRMs

Single customer view data is usually first-party data : information collected directly from your customers and prospects. It is sometimes supplemented with second- or third-party data licensed from data partners or data vendors and then reconciled with the first-party data collected by a company.

What type of data is collected for a single customer view?

A single customer view should include as much data about a customer as possible. Ideally, the data is collected in real or near-real time and stored in a central location that’s easily accessible for non-technical members of every team and on every relevant platform in use enterprise-wide. 

Customer data can be broken into five broad categories:

• Identity data is information like name, demographics, location, and contact details that paint a picture of who the person is.
• Descriptive data is information about what a person does — career information, hobbies and interests, product preferences, and so on.
• Quantitative data is mainly related to a customer’s interaction with a company’s products : purchase date, cost, and billing information, for example.
• Behavioral data covers anything the customer does online , from website visits to social media activity and engagement to the type of devices they use.
• Qualitative data describes a customer’s preferences : their favorite color or the size they usually buy, as well as their opinions about products, customer service, and other company touchpoints. 

The data in single customer view profiles can include:

• Contact information such as email address, phone number, and through what channel the customer prefers to be contacted
• Device information , including the type of hardware (smartphone, desktop computer, laptop, or tablet), the operating system, the browser, and whether they’ve used more than one device to interact with a brand
• Transaction history, including what and when the customer has browsed and purchased, what’s still in their shopping cart, and what purchases they’ve abandoned, returned, or canceled
• Demographic and geographic information such as age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education, personal interests, and travel patterns
• Firmographic and professional information such as their profession, employment history, position in their company, and whether they have purchasing-making authority
• Website behavior , including content viewed and downloaded, demo videos viewed, visiting patterns, typical user journeys, form submissions
• Online behavior, including what ads they’ve viewed, what sites they’ve visited, what social media platforms they’ve posted on, and what company-sponsored webinars they’ve attended
• In-person behavior (also called offline data) gathered at events like trade shows and user conferences or at brick-and-mortar retail stores through POS systems
• Purchasing lifecycle stage and brand engagement 
• Communications with sales or customer service teams
• Loyalty program participation, including purchasing patterns, points or benefits earned, and how they are spent
• Product usage , including in-app purchases, length of time logged in, and which features they use most often

Benefits of a single customer view

Customers expect content to be personalized and every stage in their purchasing journey to be as frictionless as possible. But inaccurate or incomplete customer data can lead to marketing errors that erode confidence in a brand — for example, by sending the same email offer to a customer multiple times, or a discount coupon for a product they just paid full price for. Poor data can also lead to a poor return on ad spend (ROAS) after advertising a product to customers who have already purchased it. 

Use cases for single customer views

Personalizing cross-channel marketing campaigns for unique, enjoyable, experiences is perhaps the best-known benefit of organizing data in single customer views. But, the data in a single customer view can also inform efforts such as:

• Improving customer service and support - Teams can solve problems faster based on contextualized information about previous customer support interactions, and follow up with advice about products or services.
• Cultivating customer lifecycle marketing efforts - Knowing which customers are active, inactive, lapsed, or prospective helps calibrate sales, upselling, and cross-selling activities, as well as loyalty program offers.
• Gauging the success of ad spend - Marketing t eams can adjust spend amounts and priority in real-time based on conversion rates.
• Developing accurate multi-channel attribution - Even when users jump between multiple devices or browsers, or navigate to the same page via different pathways (a Google ad and organic search, for example), SCVs can bring clarity to the customer journey and highlight on which channels are successful. 
• Increasing sales - Use SCVs to target product recommendations and abandoned shopping cart reminders.
• Reducing churn, boosting loyalty, and increasing user satisfaction - Understanding the reasons for failed conversions or abandoned purchases can help teams erase pain points in the customer journey and design frictionless, productive, and personalized brand interactions that enhance the customer experience. 

How to build a single view of the customer

There are six top-level considerations to address in any data strategy for building a SCV database.

1. Establish business goals

Any data strategy should begin with top-level business objectives: How does each team currently use customer data, and what do they want to achieve with that data? This process involves input from teams across an organization, as the data will ideally be available to all stakeholders. So begin by ensuring everyone understands how single customer views can benefit their team and elicit input on how they envision using the tool.

2. Determine data sources

Teams should log all potential data sources for the single customer view and how data from those sources can be centralized. Data sources can include information from platforms that handle customer relationship management, e-commerce, social media, sales, website hosting and analytics, marketing automation, in-store sales, and product usage metrics. Industry-specific platforms such as those that handle ticketing, reservations, and financial transactions are often added to the mix. Remember, the more customer data sources collected, the more accurate and useful single customer views will be.

3. Set compliance guidelines

Data collection is governed by various state and national laws, as well as industry regulations. Companies must ensure the way they collect and store customer data complies with the relevant standards, such as the General Data Protection Regulation ( GDPR ), the California Consumer Privacy Act ( CCPA ), and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act ( HIPAA ).

4. Ingest, model, and clean data 

Single customer views are typically housed in a centralized database such as a data warehouse or packaged customer data platform (CDP). That means finding a way to link the source data platforms with the centralized database so the data can be ingested and aggregated. 

Teams make use of data modeling to address data hygiene, ensuring that the data is accurate, deduplicated, consistently formatted, and free from irrelevant information. 

Then the data must be integrated, ensuring that each record represents a unique customer and that all the data related to that customer is included in that record, a process known as identity resolution . Identity resolution reconciles different records about the same customer. While it is a complex process , the functionality is built into most customer data platforms.

After the initial data is ingested into a database of single customer views, it must also be updated regularly. This involves a bi-directional connection between the database  and its data sources through a process called “extract, transform, and load” (ETL), or its sister process, “extract, load, and transform” (ELT).

5. Access, analyze, and activate data

A single customer view database is only useful if teams across an organization know how to use it. Ideally, the user interfaces for analyzing and using — or “activating” — the data for marketing activities will be intuitive and easy for non-technical users to work with . That means its integration with existing platforms should be seamless.

6. Institute data governance

A single customer view is only as good as the data it contains. Data governance is the set of procedures for collecting, storing, accessing, and using data. Data governance models document how data will be kept up to date, compliant, and accurate, and that it’s stored securely. Whether SCVs are stored in a data warehouse or a traditional CDP, platform administrators will apply these procedures as new data sources are added and old ones are deprecated. 

Using a customer data platform to build single customer views

Customer data platforms.

Customer data platforms (CDPs) are purpose-built for achieving a single view of the customer.

CDPs automate the data collection and unification of data from disparate sources and aggregate it into separate records that each contain a single customer view profile by identifying and eliminating duplicate entries and inconsistencies. Their native functionality often includes:

• APIs for linking to external data sources or a data warehouse as well as marketing automation systems
• Identity resolution tools for unifying disparate datasets
• Intuitive interfaces for nontechnical users
• Flexible analytics tools for slicing and dicing data.

Marketers use CDPs for market segmentation, audience building, journey orchestration, and other tactics that form the backbone of personalized or targeted marketing campaigns. 

Traditional vs. composable CDPs

The key difference between a traditional and composable customer data platform is where the data is stored.

A traditional or packaged CDP is a standalone platform that stores customer data internally, while a composable CDP connects to a cloud-based data warehouse .

Traditional CDPs are less flexible: The platform dictates the data points, models, and sources, as well as the activation channels. And because the data is stored locally, updating it is more cumbersome and often involves manual data dumps from multiple systems that must be performed by IT staff.

A composable CDP connects to an existing data warehouse, giving companies more control over their data. This control is especially important for businesses with complex data and those in highly regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare, and education. 

Composable CDPs also enable teams to use the martech stack — and marketing channels — they choose, providing faster time-to-value and integration with best-of-breed technology. And since the composable CDP sits on top of the data warehouse, it can quickly activate campaigns to any channel based on the single customer view in the data warehouse — no need to wait to copy information from a separate database. 

Challenges to creating a single customer view

A data silo is a database that’s populated and controlled by one department or team but isolated from the rest of the organization. Data silos tend to arise organically as large or fast-growing companies add new channels and platforms without planning for how the data will be shared company-wide. 

Customer data silos become detrimental when one silo contains data describing the same customers in another silo, but the data between them differs. Silos also make exchanging information between departments difficult, and reconciling the information across silos is often a manual and time-consuming process that can introduce errors. Data silos are the single biggest obstacle to developing a single customer view.

Using a cloud-based data warehouse and composable CDP is the ideal way to tear down the data silos. Because every team’s data is uploaded to the data warehouse, every team is working from the same set of accurate customer data, putting enterprise-wide strategy decisions on a surer footing.  That data can be combined to build single customer views and also put to use by other teams for various purposes.

Compliance, legal, and privacy concerns

Many companies have been collecting customer data for years. The data collection methods, and even the data itself, may no longer be in compliance with laws and regulations governing the collection and storage of the data in various platforms. Embarking on an SCV project is the perfect opportunity for a legal review of the provenance of legacy data.

Legacy data formats and technology

It’s not just reconciling and aggregating the information in data silos that poses a hurdle to building comprehensive customer profiles. The data in those silos may be in disparate or outdated formats, or housed in older or proprietary technologies that make it difficult to connect to other platforms so the data can be extracted. Some customer data may even have been maintained manually or in simple applications like spreadsheets or flat-file databases. Finding a way to unlock data from many different sources and reformat it so that it can be maintained properly going forward can be a formidable challenge.

Emerging trends in use cases for single customer views

Artificial intelligence and machine learning.

Generative AI has already had a profound impact on the way marketers work . Machine learning is now being applied to data modeling and analysis to make real-time predictions about future customer behavior based on historical customer data. This, in turn, enables marketers to anticipate what prospects and customers want, allowing them to provide personalized experiences that yield more conversions and sales. 

Because a CDP powers real-time advertising platforms connected to it, retargeting campaigns will attract new customers with a similar single customer view through lookalike modeling. As industry-specific machine learning models proliferate, the accuracy of this functionality will continue to improve. 

AI can also be applied to data hygiene tasks to make building and maintaining single customer views more efficient.

Privacy and data security

As privacy protections evolve, single customer views have the potential to power sophisticated encryption methods, better consent solicitation workflows, and integrations with more flexible data privacy technologies.

Channel integrations

The number of online and offline marketing channels for reaching out to prospects and touchpoints for customers is always growing. In the future, single customer views will incorporate information from emerging technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) devices, augmented reality platforms, and even biometric devices, all through integrations with the data warehouse.

Warehouse-centric technology

As the cloud data warehouse becomes commonplace in enterprise companies, more technology will be developed that centers around the warehouse and the single customer view stored there. Warehouse-native applications for event collection, processing, and AI-powered data modeling will build off of and enhance the SCV data.

More from the University

Enterprise data warehouse (edw), composable cdp built on google bigquery, looking for guidance on your data warehouse.

Supercharge your favorite marketing and sales tools with intelligent customer audiences built in BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift.

DATA | CASE STUDY

Implement a single view of the customer, company overview.

A manufacturer of analog, mixed-signal and digital signal processing integrated circuits used to convert, condition and process real-world phenomena, such as light, sound, temperature, motion, and pressure into electrical signals.

BUSINESS NEED

The client wanted to move their externally managed customer master process to an in-house solution they could manage themselves. Their goal was to maintain their own single view of the customer solution mastering both account and contact entities and the relationship between the two. They needed greater control and flexibility around data quality, standardization and validation, along with the ability to better manage change and processing times. The client partnered with Ironside to develop the single view of the customer solution.

Ironside’s Information Management practice was responsible for delivering the solution. The solution included building data cleansing, data standardization and data validation routines to prepare the data for matching and consolidation to ultimately master the data. This included validating and standardizing business and personal names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. The data was enriched with different attributes to better define the address, and the account and contact entities.

Develop a Plan

Start with the requirements statement of work. During this phase, the software was installed, data profiling and a data quality assessment was completed which supported business requirements, and business and technical solution documents were generated

Completing the business and technical documents supported the creation of the statement of work and implementation plan for the build phase

Define the Data Sources

Enriched address data with the Spectrum Universal Address Module On-Demand web services. These services validated addresses making corrections, scoring, validation and adding attributes such as a residential indicator

Incorporated Google Translate into the process to translate Account Names in foreign languages. Keeping all Account Names in a common language increases the matching potential and helps to better define the “Golden Record”

Formalize the Approach

Spectrum allowed data sources to be added quickly and easily, allowing for greater flexibility than before. Created sub-processes which can be reused as needed, which reduced the initial development time along with future development

Used Spectrum to incorporate transliteration for personal name standardization and address validation and translation for account names

Ensure Future Success

Move from third party managed MDM solution to one managed internally

Decreased processing time, allowing for multiple processes per day and faster updates to target systems

Manage changes to the solution in a timely manner and no longer need to wait on the vendor to complete the change

Adapt to data inconsistencies in an easier manner, which allows for better data quality to help better align the sales force with their accounts and contacts

KEYS TO SUCCESS

By moving to an in-house master data management solution, the client is now able to:

Increase match rate from the previously managed master data management process by 2-3x

Better align sales force with client accounts

Quickly adapt to business rule changes, which was difficult to do with the previous MDM solution

Better address validation and data standardization allows accounts to be aligned to a sales person and not in a generic sales grouping

About Pitney Bowes

Pitney Bowes (NYSE:PBI) is a global technology company powering billions of transactions – physical and digital – in the connected and borderless world of commerce. Clients around the world, including 90 percent of the Fortune 500, rely on products, solutions, services and data from Pitney Bowes in the areas of customer information management, location intelligence, customer engagement, shipping, mailing, and global ecommerce. And with the innovative Pitney Bowes Commerce Cloud, clients can access the broad range of Pitney Bowes solutions, analytics, and APIs to drive commerce.

READ ADDITIONAL CASE STUDIES

Empower the team with experience design, enable the tableau enterprise, formulate a data & analytics roadmap for acquisition growth strategy, multi-billion-dollar food and beverage distributor, ivy league university, north american hair salon franchise, ai jump-start at cartus to create a competitive edge, automate & streamline processes for more accurate forecasting, enable current and future growth with adaptive insights, allow flexibility & resiliency with standardized etl, migrate from oracle discoverer to cognos analytics, enable cognos analytics migration in financial services, become one of our successful clients..

Ironside is a data, analytics, and AI consulting and technology implementation company. We work with clients to understand their business objectives and day-to-day challenges, then employ our deep expertise in data strategy, architecture and engineering, integration, business intelligence, AI, and generative AI. We create technical solutions and practical approaches designed to drive smarter, data-driven decisions across a company and help it move further and faster toward its business goals.

• AWS Ascent Solutions
• IBM Data Analytic Services

GET IN TOUCH

781-860-8840

For inquiries: [email protected]

For HR: [email protected]

Office Address 131 Hartwell Ave Lexington, MA 02421

Corporate Mailing Address Ironside Group, LLC 101 Great Rd, Suite #130 Bedford, Massachusetts 01730

Regional offices in Atlanta, Austin, Boston, Charlotte, New York City and Orlando

>> Managed Services Support

• Create a Strategic Data & Analytics...
• Establish a Collaborative Data...
• How Pitney Bowes’ New Data Practice...

How a single customer view makes your team more effective

About a decade ago, titles like Social Media Manager started popping up. These roles fill the gap a growing digital culture had created. However, these new roles also create silos. In turn, these silos create various customer profiles used by different groups within the organization. A fragmented view of the customer leads to inefficiencies, but there is an answer- a single customer view.

Single Customer View

Silos don't just exist inside departments but plague most companies. The main problem with silos is there is no way to share the insights of various teams from across your organization. Not sharing insights becomes more of an issue when another department owns a piece of your workflow. For example, when data or engineering own a process like segment-building, you risk ending with overly broad and static audiences because what you truly wanted was lost in translation. To their credit, what ends up happening is your data scientist functions like a short-order cook of database queries, making segments to order instead of giving each persona the care it deserves. This result isn't good for anyone, especially the customer.The intuitive solution to these silos is housing all marketing activities in a centralized customer data platform (CDP) like Simon Data. Here's what a marketing hub should look like:

Shared Data Insights

As any marketer knows, having access to your data is the first step in understanding your customer. Now imagine having access to data insights while gaining the ability to control and play with this data on demand. Spending time playing with data leads to understanding. Understanding leads to insights that create things like better segmentation.With a centralized hub, every department gains access to the same segments; Additionally, the database updates in real-time. Meaning, the segments created by an email manager are instantly available for the social media manager to use. In the end, each department is now targeting the same customer but with their campaigns.The ability to organize teams around customer data gives a fantastic amount of flexibility. When the friction of collaborating lessens, things happen much quicker and more efficiently.

Clear Messaging

At Simon Data, we integrate your data to your end channels. We do that by housing- data, segmentation, automation, point solutions, and end channels in a single place. Through this integration, your entire company gains a window into everything happening with your brand. This access helps maintain consistent messaging and avoids redundancies. Gaining clarity into what other teams are doing strengthens customer experiences.  

Reporting and Analysis

Another area that benefits from a centralized marketing hub is your strategy. In many organizations, making a decision happens quickly. Therefore, the choice is often made without every department weighing in. As is, partial information ends up plaguing many marketing teams. A significant perk of having a central hub is not choosing between making a quick or informed decision. The centralized UI allows comparisons of past and present campaigns across any critical metric. One such example is cross-channel vs. longitudinal segment performance. This example shows how an acquisition-focused segment has performed over x-number of campaigns. Ultimately, this campaign discovers if acquisition efforts for this segment are improving.

Why It Matters

Say you see a performance issue for a particular segment. The only problem is you don't have access to your segmentation platform. In that case, someone from marketing has to ask someone in a tech role to look into the issue. This extra step adds time to an urgent matter. However, using the single customer view, the marketer who spotted the problem can inspect it instantly. What they might find is a change in performance from the east to the west coast. Once armed with this information, marketers can quickly set up new segments. These segments can address the same buckets of people with the added metric of location. While the above is a minor tweak, without this ability living in the marketing function, this task is roughly a four-week job. Throughout an organization, everyone's time is taxed. Projects you are doing get put on the back burner as new tasks arise. Having a single customer view living inside your CDP can save you time while finding new market opportunities.

Stay in the know !

Recommended resources