Single view vs multiple views
Very few businesses have a truly single view of their customer's data; most will have multiple views of the data, often duplicated and siloed within specific channels. A typical retailer may have a range of customer touchpoints including in-store, online, app, email marketing and customer services. We commonly see that, while they may be capturing rich data across one or more channels (typically eCommerce), that data is not always joined to customers' interactions within other channels such as in-store or through customer services, giving the business a fragmented or siloed view. These siloed views allow businesses to only personalise their customers' experiences separately within each channel, where this personalisation is driven through siloed data sets. This, invariably, leads to a disjointed and inconsistent customer experience. As customers, we do not view brands in siloes and therefore, naturally, we expect our experience to be consistent across every touchpoint.
A practical example of this can often be seen in product and content personalisation. It is not uncommon to see personalisation within email marketing being driven by a different data set than the personalisation within a website. This will naturally lead to different products or content being recommend to the same customer across different channels whereas a customer would expect these to always be aligned.