Decoding The Single Customer View

Having a single customer view is something that is highly sought after for a lot of businesses. Having a deep understanding of customer data will help businesses drive stronger marketing messages. More direct targeting, relevant experiences, and personalized messaging can all be improved with the introduction of a unified customer view.

All the data you have is sacred, especially when it comes to your customer data. How you collect, store, and use it is integral to the quality of your marketing efforts.

Siloed data is difficult to manage and takes time to pull together what you need. Using a customer data platform is a much more efficient way of storing the data collected by businesses, establishing a single customer view, and making it actionable.

Creating a unified customer view takes your customer interactions to the next level. But it takes a good understanding of what it is and how to put it together to establish a successful one.

Understanding Single Customer View

Understanding and establishing a single customer view isn’t something that is totally new to most businesses, but it can be to some.

What is Single Customer View?

The Single Customer View is the aggregation of all the customer data a brand has about an individual across all of the channels and touch points they interact with you on, displayed in an easy-to-access and actionable view. The Single Customer view can often be referred to as a data hub, a 360-degree vision, or a unified customer view.

Having that unified customer view means brands have a consistent and accurate representation of their customers’ interactions, preferences, behaviors, and demographics in one place. By combining data from various different channels such as marketing, sales, customer support, website activity, social media, and more, companies can gain a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs, preferences, and engagement patterns.

The concept of 360-degree customer view goes a little bit deeper. It considers data from traditional sources including transactional records, customer support interactions, and demographic information. While also including all other data points in the single customer view.

The term “360 degree” implies a fully comprehensive view of the customer, as if looking at them from every possible angle. It involves capturing data throughout the entire customer lifecycle. From initial brand awareness and acquisition, through engagement and transactions, all the way to ongoing support and retention efforts.

The Importance of Single Customer View

Given that a single customer view provides a comprehensive and unified understanding, it plays a massive role in managing the relationship between the customer and the brand.

Providing the customer with the best possible experience is what will make them loyal to you and improve your retention rates. This can’t happen unless you know your customer inside out.

There are some key benefits of a single customer view that aids in customer relationship management.

Personalization

Your unified customer view makes personalized customer experiences seamless to deliver. By understanding customer preferences, behaviours, and purchase history, companies can tailor their marketing efforts to customers on an individual basis.

This creates a more relevant and engaging customer experience that boosts satisfaction and loyalty.

Segmentation

By analyzing customer data, businesses can identify distinct customer segments based on demographics, preferences, and behaviors. This enables targeted marketing campaigns and customized communication strategies for each individual customer segment, leading to an increase in response and conversion rates.

Data Driven Decision Making

When it comes to a single customer view, organizations can use the data to make informed decisions about developing their product, marketing and sales efforts, customer retention initiatives, and resource allocation.

Driving your decisions with data leads to more targeted and effective CRM strategies, ultimately driving growth and profitability.

Implementing Single Customer View

Understanding the concept is one battle. But the main bulk of the work that you do around establishing a unified customer view is in the actual implementation.

Key Components of a Single Customer View Strategy

Collecting your data and integrating it with your systems correctly ensures accurate and comprehensive customer profiles.

When it comes to collecting customer data to be used to build your single customer view, the cleaner and more direct the better.

Going directly to the customer and collecting data from the source is the best possible way to get clean data. Collecting zero party data is more straight forward than you might first think. Customers are also generally quite open to it as well, providing there is a value exchange that is relevant to them. Use things like quizzes, polls, conversational pop ups, and post purchase surveys to collect this data.

Integrating the data to create your customer profiles is your next step. You need to ensure that you are storing the data properly and treating it well to get the best out of it. A customer data platform is the best place to store your customer data. Having your data all in one place is far more manageable than having it spread across multiple places.

Customer identity resolution is an important next step in the single customer view. It’s the process of accurately identifying and linking your customer data from the various sources you collect it from and establishing the complete view of the customer.

The purpose of identity resolution is to overcome the challenge that fragmented and inconsistent data brings. By resolving this, businesses can gain a holistic understanding of their customers.

Data attributes like names, email addresses, phone numbers, unique identifiers, and other relevant data are used to match and link customer records. Once the matches are identified, the data is pulled together to create a single, comprehensive customer profile.

But the work doesn’t just stop once you have that customer profile fully built out. You need to take steps to ensure that it is maintained and up to date. This is where having real-time data capabilities comes into its own. It plays a crucial role in keeping your single customer view relevant and up to date.

Real-time data processing for the single customer view enables organizations to responds swiftly to customer needs, deliver personalized experiences, and make data driven decisions in milliseconds. In turn, this all enhances customer engagement, supports real time marketing efforts, and helps companies compete in rapidly evolving markets.

Steps to Implement an Effective Single Customer View Strategy

Implementing your single customer view effectively takes careful planning and consideration. Here are a few things to keep in mind when it comes to putting together your strategy.

Start by identifying your relevant data sources. These are sources that contain customer-related information within your organization. These would usually include CRM systems, transactional databases, customer support systems, website analytics tools, social media platforms, and others.

It’s important that, across the business, you are engaging with all relevant stakeholders to ensure that all of your data sources are considered and nothing is missed.

When it comes to any strategy, your data is essential to it’s success. And the success of building out a 360 degree view of your existing customers is also down to the health of your data. Rules, regulations, and practices should be established in your business when it comes to how you handle it. This is to ensure the data is accurate and consistent across all data points.

It’s important to use technology to your advantage. There are solutions that facilitate data integrations and analysis for a single customer view. Consider using a customer data platform, or other similar tools that enable data integrations from multiple sources.

Leverage your data and visualization tools to get insights from your data and create a unified view of the customer. You can also explore machine learning other AI techniques to automate data processing and analysis for real-time results.

Case Studies: Success Stories of Single Customer View

please briefly describe case studies – XP customers – if possible.

Our customers at Xtremepush have experienced some excellent results with our CDP and establishing their single customer view.

Their campaigns have become much stronger by understanding their customers and sending them personalized messages through our digital channels. By utilizing the Xtremepush SCV their customer journey became a lot smoother.

Case Study 1

Ownersbox is a fantasy sports operator, providing online fantasy league games to players across Canada and 36 States in the US. They provide players the opportunity to play for daily or weekly prizes in fantasy leagues across the NFL, MLB, NBA and the NHL.

However, they struggled with data silos resulting from using multiple standalone solutions to communicate with their players.

By using Xtremepush’s customer engagement platform with its built-in CDP, Ownersbox were able to consolidate their player data to create detailed Single Customer Views and segment them into buckets to allow for hyper-personalized communications.

Deploying Xtremepush has allowed Ownersbox to significantly improve engagement with an all time open rate of 33.69% across their email campaigns.

They have also seen a significant uplift in signups and deposits have increased by 50% going into the NFL 2023 season.

Case Study 2

Oddschecker is the world’s number-one odds comparison website. In late 2018, they began working with Xtremepush to consolidate their engagement channels and enhance their digital marketing strategy with a unified view of their customers. Five years on, Oddschecker is still using Xtremepush, using the platform to execute real-time multichannel campaigns.

Xtremepush enabled Oddschecker to build a true single customer view and highly granular segments accessible for omnichannel targeting. This is through the use of the Xtremepush CDP and consolidation of all of their data under one roof.

In 2023 alone they’ve seen a 12% increase in email open rates, a 71% increase in click rates, an 83% increase in click to open rates, a 20% increase in their active user base and an 18% increase in bettors via push notifications.

Challenges and Solutions in Implementing Single Customer View

As with any new implementation for a business, there are challenges along the way that must be overcome. But there are some straightforward solutions that will help you along the way.

Common Challenges in Implementing Single Customer View

Managing your customer data while ensuring privacy and security of that data is of utmost importance. How you manage and store customer data must comply with all data protection regulations, like GDPR or CCPA.

Organizations must also ensure they are safeguarding their customer information with robust security measures. There is a balance that must be struck by businesses when it comes to utilizing data while also respecting privacy.

A common challenge amongst businesses when it comes to data is having it stored in different places and setting up data siloes. This is where different datasets are stored using different departments or systems. This not only makes it much more difficult to build out customer profiles, but also to integrate your data. Integrating data in such a way requires overcoming multiple technical barriers like incompatible data formats, inconsistent data quality, and complex data integration processes.

Finding ways to break down these data silos and creating a seamless data flow across systems is where things will begin to click and results should follow soon after.

There is a serious need for businesses to have real-time data processing capabilities in their arsenal. In order to provide customers with an up to date, relevant experience, you need the most up to date and relevant data. Collecting, processing, and analyzing data from various sources in real-time requires robust infrastructure, scalable tech, and efficient data processing capabilities.

All of this needs to work together so that your data is updated in milliseconds, not hours. Implementing these processing capabilities can be complex and resource intensive for businesses.

Solutions and Best Practices

Using secure and compliant data management practices should help in overcoming challenges when implementing your single customer view. It is imperative that companies invest in robust security measures and data governance frameworks to protect data. Encryption techniques, access controls, and data anonymization methods should all be employed to ensure that data privacy regulations are being complied with.

Businesses should regularly review and update data management policies and procedures to address emerging risks and regulatory changes.

There is so much technology to invest in and utilize that facilitate data integrations and help establish the unified customer view and the overall customer journey. Customer data platforms, data integration tools, and other cloud based services are available in their droves. This type of tech can enable seamless aggregation and consolidation of customer data form various sources.

Utilize real-time data processing capabilities to derive insights and deliver up to date personalized experiences.

The processes you put in place around maintaining your data will have an effect on the quality of it and on the single customer view. Data quality checks, cleansing routines, and deduplicating mechanisms all play their role to ensure accuracy and consistency of your data.

Your customer profiles should be regularly updated in order to reflect changing customer information or preferences.

Conclusion: The Future of Single Customer View

As with any piece of tech in the modern era, it is bound to reach new limits before we even know it. Here’s a few things to look out for when it comes to the future development of the single customer view.

Real-time data processing capabilities that provide immediate and actionable insights about customers is something that businesses should start making use of.

Personalization has been the name of the game when it comes to customer relationship management in the recent past. Using the unified customer view to boost the level of personalization for customers should prove to be very effective.

Predictive analytics is becoming a prominent theme when it comes to SCV strategies. By leveraging the data you have about your customers and identifying patterns in behaviors, you should be able to predict what they might do, or be interested in down the line.

AI and machine learning will also have its role to play in the SCV and its advancement. They can analyze vast amounts of customer data to help identify patterns and group customers into segments. This makes personalization and tailored offers much more powerful.

Sentiment analysis driven by AI allows organizations to assess customer sentiments and emotions from various channels, such as social media, email outreach, and customer feedback. Understanding customer sentiment helps businesses gauge customer satisfaction and sentiment towards their brand.

FAQs

What is a Single Customer View and why is it important?

The Single Customer View is the aggregation of all the customer data a brand has about an individual across all of the channels and touch points they interact with you on, displayed in an easy-to-access and actionable view.

It’s important for businesses as it means they have a consistent and accurate representation of their customers’ interactions, preferences, behaviours, and demographics in one place.

What are the key components of a Single Customer View strategy?

Some key components for an SCV strategy include having clean and actionable data, integrating and storing that data in the right manner with a CDP or other data integration tools, and identifying and linking your customer data from the various sources you collect it from and establishing the complete view of the customer.

How can a business implement an effective Single Customer View strategy?

When it comes to implementing an effective unified view of the customer.

Firstly, identify relevant data sources, like CRM systems, transactional databases, customer support systems, website analytics tools, social media platforms. Make sure you always keep your data in good health by establishing rules, regulations, and practices. Finally, make sure you’re using the right tech to support your efforts.