Single Customer View (SCV): The Future of Customer Engagement

Data is integral to every kind of modern marketing. For most businesses, customer data is acquired across a variety of channels, giving marketers lots of valuable insights at their fingertips.

There are more ways for a consumer to engage with your brand than ever before – signing up to email lists, following on social media, browsing and not buying as well as all the ways to actually purchase from a brand. In general, this data does not get loaded into a single view of the customer database, which means that there is a lot of very valuable data that is missing or not being used.

With so many touchpoints, there is so much to know about your customers; how they engage and transact, how they behave, which channels they prefer, and how they interact across your business. For example, knowing that it is the same person on the email list who recently bought from your brand is very useful.

With a single customer view (SCV), this information is all brought together into a unified view – and furthermore, keeps the user experience personalised.

What is single customer view?

A single customer view (SCV) (also known as a 360 or unified customer view) is a unified view of all the data you have collected relating to a single individual. This consolidates customer or prospect data into one single, coherent record.

With all of this information in one location, you’ll be able to understand a full view of the individual. This includes information from sources such as your website, sales transactions, social media channels, customer service interactions, marketing tools, and other touchpoints.

Single customer view solutions place all of this valuable data together for you, so that you can make smarter business decisions from a clean, cohesive database.

What are the benefits of a single customer view?

1. Cross-channel marketing data

The main benefit of single customer view (SCV) is that it brings cross-channel marketing data together into one individual record. This pieces together the whole customer journey from start to finish, regardless of how many different channels or touch points they have used to engage with your brand.

The benefit of this is that it tells you which marketing channels contribute the most to final conversions and transactions. Without a single customer view, determining this can be very challenging due to the many different ways that buyers can interact with your brand.

For example, individuals might initially interact with your website on a smartphone, then jump to desktop at a later point for their second interaction. Similarly, a buyer might firstly discover your brand via organic search, and then later convert off the back of an email marketing campaign.

2. Access customer data across the organisation

Creating a single customer view can help make data more accessible across the organisation.

With all of the customer’s data in one unified view, this helps different teams in the business work from the same database. Not only does this make internal processes more efficient, it also removes the risk of data siloes, where the same customer’s data is kept separately in different databases, acquired through different channels by different teams.

3. Deduplicate data

Duplicate data is one of the most common data quality issues businesses face. The majority of duplicate data occurs because different data entries are split across multiple records. For instance, data entries from different channels across different records or software without integration.

This can cause a whole load of problems for businesses. For example, duplicate data can easily end in marketing mishaps, where multiple of the same communication are sent to the same contact. This is one of the quickest ways to disrupt the user journey and lose trust.

However, with a single customer view, all of the customer’s data is consolidated within a single record – massively reducing the risks associated with duplicate data entries.

4. Personalise the customer experience

A survey from SmarterHQ found that 72% of customers will only engage with personalised messaging. A single customer view is designed to facilitate personalised communications, giving you detailed information about that individual, and how they engage with your brand.

This means that by using an SCV, you can engage with your customers in a way that resonates with them. For example, if they prefer to engage through email, and tend to interact at a certain time of the day, then you could tailor your communications to suit this.

That way, the customer benefits from an experience that works for them.

5. Make informed marketing decisions

Every marketing decision should be based on complete, quality data. And with a single customer view, you get to see the big picture in all its detail. No missing pieces, no assumptions, no more shots in the dark.

This allows you to connect with customers in a way that’s meaningful to them, and at the most relevant points in the conversion process. Tailor your approach to their engagement, lifestyle and communication preferences. A single customer view can even be used to predict future customers behaviours and adjust your marketing strategy to target those needs.

Thing to consider when building a single customer view

The benefits of a single customer view are unmatched. However, that’s not to say that developing an SCV doesn’t come without its challenges. Some of these challenges are straightforward to overcome, while others can be a bit more tricky to navigate.

Data quality

In order to develop a single customer view record, you’ll need to ensure you are working with quality data. It is crucial that data is reliable, accurate and up-to-date. This ensures that the data within the single customer view can be trusted and that it is reflective of reality. If the data is low quality, you may not be able to rely on the SCV to provide the potential it is capable of.

For instance, the data could be:

• Duplicated
• Disconnected
• Decayed
• Distrusted

Data silos

A data silo is a group of data that is only controlled by one department, in isolation from other departments in the business. Data siloes often occur as a result of different teams acquiring data through different channels, without integrating the databases together.

For example, a social media team might collect customer data through social channels, whereas email marketing teams would collect through email channels. Consolidating disconnected data can be very challenging and time-consuming, especially if there are discrepancies.

This can make developing a single customer view much more difficult.

Legacy software

Perhaps the biggest challenge in developing a single customer view, many companies use database software that is incapable of supporting an SCV record. This means that even if you did collect customer data across different points in the buying journey, the system simply couldn’t connect the data points together into a single customer view.

Use the data, don't lose it

Another crime committed in the name of the SCV was building vast quantities of data into a database, and then doing not very much with it. This feels like the biggest crime of all.

Why hold information about your customers and then treat them all the same? Or know that you have an individual on your email list, who buys online yet send them competing offers via other channels or on social media? Sadly, this happens every day.

Building a single view of the customer is not a technology solution, it is a mindset change. The companies who have succeeded in the use of data, for example Tesco and Sainsbury’s, have done so not just by investing in big database solutions (which they undoubtedly have) but also by investing in campaign planners and data scientists to mine the data, make some judgements, test theories and operationalise the ones that work.

Again, this is as important today as it ever was, with an increased need to be structured and organised. Just like the data in your SCV.

Changes to Cookie Laws

With the new changes to cookie laws, it is going to be harder to use a consumer’s browsing history to deliver ads or offers. As such, what you know about them as an individual from the engagement they have with you becomes even more important. This is what is called first party data.

At the same time, the permission to engage with an individual across any channel is absolutely vital. The SCV can be a very useful repository for holding not only transactional data but also ad hoc engagement data and permissions.

Connecting big data

One of the previous issues with building enterprise level database solutions for an SCV was the volume of data that had to be copied and held centrally. The prevailing wind today is that holding a copy of all data just doesn’t make sense. And with the increase of data in the digital world – pages visited, posts, likes, comments and so on – it could be massively cost prohibitive.

In general, what we want to know in the SCV is how people have engaged and where the detail is on that engagement. Having connectors in place makes that much easier. For example, if we have an email address on a mailing list, we can use that to prospect to them. As and when they purchase and we get a physical address, we can then connect that email address to an individual household where we also have another customer email address. The same goes for other connectors like IP address or mobile number.

There are now many spine files combining these connectors that are commercially available to help create these connections.

GDPR and single customer view records

From a GDPR point of view, there are three main areas to consider when developing a single customer view:

1. How do I keep the data in my SCV current and up to date?
2. How do I structure the SCV so that I can hold permissions and consent correctly?
3. What do I need to do to ensure that I share the correct information with my customers, as and when this is required?

So, taking each of these in turn:

Keep the data up to date

What became apparent during the conversations was that there are different levels of understanding of what is required under GDPR in terms of keeping data up to date. This isn’t that surprising as most of the concentration to date has been on consent and ensuring that we have permission to contact the consumers we want to engage with.

However, we have an obligation as well to keep the data we hold current and clean. And to archive or delete what is no longer needed. In some cases this has not been considered, in others it was seen as a lower priority.

From a Sagacity point of view, our advice is very clear; with the GDPR Article 5 requiring that personal data be kept clean and accurate (or be deleted!), choosing a trusted solution to optimise the quality of your data and maximise compliance is now business critical. Whether this is ad hoc but planned updates, real-time access via APIs or licensing of the different industry suppression products there is no choice but to make sure there is a solution that works for your business in place.

As such, choosing a trusted location to hold the key information on your customers, optimise the quality of your data and maximise compliance is now business critical. Keeping the data current, tracking permissions and consent and ensuring that SARs can be responded to quickly and accurately are all part of the new world of data quality management.

Structuring the SCV for holding consent

This is actually an area we have had to wrestle with ourselves, how do we hold the correct consent data, and all the associated information such as when consent was given, under which privacy policy, and re-consent in a user-friendly way in the SCV?

There is no easy way to answer this. We have tackled it by building a consent table that holds each of the key pieces of information – which allows us to manage change over time – that is then referenced on each customer record. This allows us to ensure we keep the most recent permission against a record, by channel, but also enables us to track changes over time. This does result in a very large lookup table but better that than extending customer records.

The other thing to bear in mind is to hold both what consent was gained, where and when but also what the usage you have agreed for that customer record by channel. For example, you may have gathered consent to contact by Direct Mail but have chosen Legal as the reason for contact and this needs to be held. In addition, note that this needs to be managed by customer, by product, by channel so can become cumbersome if not managed correctly.

Giving consumers access

Finally, from a consumer access point of view, there are two key things to consider in terms of contact: managing subject access requests (SARs) and also allowing consumers to see what information is held on them for permission management.

From a SAR point of view, there were two clear messages:

1. Be very clear what is going to be shared as part of a SAR. It’s not our place to advise what the content should be but what was interesting was how varied and differently detailed each SAR response format was going to be. This is something to be tackled early, agreed with your legal teams and shared as appropriate.
2. Having an SCV doesn’t sort out SAR responses but it helps a lot! Having as much data held in one place as is possible makes the tracking of information needed for a SAR substantially easier.

From a permission management point of view, again there were a lot of different views and positions. Some organisations, the more digital email only brands in particular, seem to be using their ESP to manage and share permissions with customers. For others there was a workstream to agree what was to be shared and how. Interestingly, no one stated that they were fully on top of this.

There are many approaches to be taken here. At Sagacity, we have partnered with a business, My Life Digital, who provide a Permission Management solution. We are implementing this for our own use and also recommend it for our clients. Other solutions are available!

Overall, tackling GDPR compliance from an SCV point of view isn’t a luxury but a necessity. Keeping the data current, tracking permissions and consent and ensuring that SARs can be responded to quickly and accurately are all part of the new world of data management. It is very clear that there is a lot of work to be done, by big brands and smaller businesses, to meet the basics, never mind the nice to haves. It’s going to be a fun year!

Create your single customer view

We give businesses a complete view of individual customers and prospects with market leading single customer view services. Our data managers do all of the hard work for you, combining data and insights from multiple sources to create a unified customer view.

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