Single view of customer

From Silos to Success

Breaking Down Barriers with a Single View of the Customer

Single Customer View

From Silos to Success: Breaking Down Barriers with a Single View of the Customer

The importance of customer data is not new news. It has been written about countless times before and most business leaders know that understanding their customer data is important. We speak to a lot of businesses about their customer data and most tell us that they would like a Single Customer View (SCV) but they are not always clear how they will build it or what they will do with it when they get there. A single view of customers can be a very powerful tool for businesses but the journey to get to that point is rarely easy.

Why businesses should build a single customer view

When someone tells me a goal or target one of my first questions is always 'Why?'.  Why do you want a native app?  Why do you want a loyalty scheme?  Why do you need a single customer view?  It is surprisingly common that we see businesses trying to answer the how without, first, properly answering the why.  There is no point focusing on a goal without really understanding why you are doing it and what you are trying to achieve. Building an SCV can be a complex process so it is vitally important to understand how you will realise the benefits before you invest the time and money in it.

The main reason why any business should build a single customer view is that it allows them to provide highly targeted and consistent personalised marketing and experiences to their customers across all channels and touchpoints.

There is a big difference between understanding your customers as a whole and understanding them as individuals. Understanding your customers as a whole allows you to tailor your products, services, marketing and communication to suit the majority of your customers. It allows you to adjust your marketing and communication within different geographical regions or to change your product selection on different channels, but it is always personalising at a relatively high and basic level and is most often siloed within individual channels.

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.

 

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