Imagine if you could take one look at your customer’s profile and have everything there is to know about that person at your fingertips—from the best contact information to transaction history and current engagements. With a single customer view, companies are able to understand their customers better than ever.
The amount of consumer data available to companies is extraordinary. But it’s not uncommon for this information to be dispersed across the business, risking the near miss of upsell or cross-sell opportunities. In this article, we will take a deeper look at what a single customer view is and how it can help you better understand who your customers are.
What is a single customer view?
A single customer view, or a 360-view, is a concept based on unifying all instances of a customer to a single record and in many cases, cross-links all the data pertaining to that client into one, trustworthy view.
You can also think of single customer view as a form of data consolidation. Using a common key or unique identifier, you can connect a variety of different sources to create a comprehensive and consolidated view of each customer within and across systems.
At its core, a single customer view allows you to know your customers better. You get an insider’s look at your customer’s name, the best contact information to reach them—their email, mailing address, and phone number—demographics, psychographics, transaction history, and so on, all in one place. Not only does this effectively better your data strategy, but it also improves your business strategy and key priorities like improving the customer experience.
When you don’t have this connection, it may not be clear that you have the same customers across lines of business, disrupting the consumer experience, revenue growth, and the potential for error-prone reporting.
Our latest global research shows us that 85% of organizations indicate that poor quality contact data for customers negatively impacts their operational processes and efficiency. With over half of organizations prioritizing improving the customer experience year over year, it’s vital to have a clear, concise, and correct view of consumer data.
Top benefits of a single customer view
The benefits of a 360-view of consumer data start within the data team but will also be quicky realized across the entire business. When there is a consolidated view of information, organizations are likely to see:
1. Greater consumer insight – Leverage trusted data for a comprehensive view of each customer by pulling vital contact information and enriched consumer attributes together.
2. Growing revenue – A single customer view empowers you to locate cross-sell and upsell opportunities like shopping habits, purchase history, and demographics and market to consumers based on their complete portfolio.
3. Accurate reporting – With profiling and cleansing measures in place, you can ensure that you have the correct contact information for outreach initiatives and that your data is actionable, ready for any decision.
4. Managing fraud – A single customer view allows you to see duplicates across accounts and discover potential threats like coupon fraud, truncated fields, placeholder information, and so on.
A single customer view enables you to take a data-driven approach to client-focused strategies like marketing campaigns and branded customer experience initiatives. In fact, our research finds that 88% of business leaders say that being data driven helps them stay on top of customer needs and market trends. A single customer view provides endless benefits to inform business strategy and improve operational efficiencies, but it also enables you to take a data driven approach to client focused strategies like loyalty programs.
Single customer view for loyalty
In a highly competitive market, paid loyalty programs are on the rise. Think of big brand names like Amazon Prime, CVS CarePass, Walmart Plus, and many more. These retailers capture their customers’ attention with free loyalty point systems, then retain them for the long-term with paid loyalty memberships and additional benefits.
However, to build a customer loyalty program, whether it’s free or paid, requires significant customer knowledge. Here’s why:
1. You must know who your customer is, how to reach them, and what they care about to effectively target them with the loyalty campaign.
2. The loyalty benefits are available as soon as the membership starts and before revenue can be accrued.
3. Lastly, the drivers behind these paid loyalty programs need to keep track of which customers are using the free program versus the paid program to ensure they are receiving the right information, benefits, and program usage. It also enables you to see how many users are converting from the free to paid programs.
This is where a 360-view of customers becomes essential for a loyalty program. The ability to consolidate data into a single, accurate record enables companies to effectively strategize their marketing efforts and ensure that that they are reaching the right person, at the right time, with the right message.
How to get started
If you are working on building a loyalty program for your business or focused on building a customer-centric strategy, consider what a data-driven approach, like a single customer view, could do for you. With our data quality platform, you can customize your data consolidation and create an all-inclusive single customer view.
