An integrated, single customer view continues to evade most enterprises. What is it and how can businesses achieve a 360° view of the customer in 5 steps?
Table of Contents
What is a Single Customer View?
Why Enterprises Seek a Single Customer View
Top Challenges in Achieving a Single Customer View
Achieving a Single Customer View in 5 Steps
Choosing the Right Technology
Gaining a Single Customer View With Data Products
What is a Single Customer View?
When we say “single customer view”, we’re talking about a unified, 360-degree picture of the customer – one that integrates the interaction, transaction, and master data of each and every customer.
A single customer view, also referred to as “Customer 360”, enables enterprises to improve the customer journey, provide more personalized experiences, boost engagement, prevent churn, and more.
However, achieving a single customer view is easier said than done. Despite hefty investments in enterprise technologies like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Master Data Management (MDM), Customer Data Platforms (CDP), and custom in-house solutions, only 14% of business and IT executives report achieving a truly integrated view of the customer (according to a recent Gartner survey).
In this article, we’ll cover why a single customer view is so important, its top benefits and challenges, and 5 steps to actually achieve that elusive 360 customer view.
Why Enterprises Seek a Single Customer View
Today, customer data is fragmented and dispersed across different systems and apps. Without the ability to create a unified customer profile – one that combines all of a customer’s data and histories – it’s impossible to see the whole picture. That means valuable information, that could have otherwise helped provide a better customer experience, or increase sales, is out of reach.
Tools that deliver a fully integrated, single customer view make it possible to provide consistently positive and individualized customer experiences, which in turn, strengthens engagement, loyalty, and retention.
It’s also an essential prerequisite to making up-to-date, unified, standardized customer data accessible and usable for authorized data consumers, from marketing to sales, customer support, and beyond.
For enterprises that collect and generate troves of customer data every day, having the ability to clearly visualize each individual’s data – across business domains and channels – and use that information to drive real-time experiences, is crucial.
Top Challenges in Achieving a Single Customer View
Here’s why achieving a single customer view is so challenging for so many enterprises:
-
Data quality
Ensuring data quality requires continuous data integration, extraction, unification, and preparation. These needs, combined with ever-changing IT landscapes and data quality requirements, make data quality standards difficult to reach. -
Data integration
In the modern enterprise, customer data is fragmented, inconsistent, and often redundant. On top of that, it’s stored across multiple, siloed systems – in different formats, technologies, and terminologies. -
Data freshness
Since customer data changes all the time and must be extracted from many different sources, keeping a unified view of the customer complete, clean and fresh is a challenge. -
Scale and speed
Data fragmentation makes it extremely difficult to integrate customer data quickly and at scale. This often prevents data consumers from gaining real-time access to trusted customer data. -
IT resources
Most IT teams are unprepared to manage the explosive growth in data, applications, and APIs. Enterprise-wide projects, like Customer 360, often require integration expertise in every domain, which many companies haven’t yet accounted for. -
Data privacy compliance
Integrating and sharing customer data with data consumers within the organization introduces new risks of noncompliance with local and international privacy regulations.
Achieving a Single Customer View in 5 Steps
-
Identify data sources and map customer data
For most enterprises, customer data is dispersed across departments, on-prem and cloud-based platforms, and apps, including “shadow IT” and “dark data”. Therefore, the first crucial step is identifying all of the systems and applications that contain customer data. It also helps to understand where discrepancies exist, such as the different ways in which different business units enter and manage data, which often leads to contradictory, outdated, or duplicate information. Attempts to manually identify all data sources are a waste of time and effort. Instead, enterprises should set their sights on a solution that can locate them automatically. -
Ingest and unify customer data
After mapping and identifying all relevant data sources, the next step is to aggregate and unify it. That means ingesting data from various business domains and operational systems, and combining them into a single source. -
Clean, enrich, and transform the data as needed
As we mentioned above, customer data is dispersed across different systems and databases, often with inconsistent formats, technologies, and terminologies. Therefore, it will be necessary to perform data transformations, scheme integrations, data cleansing, and elimination of duplicate records. Sometimes the data ingested from internal sources need also to be enriched with data from external sources, such as social networks, public data sources and more. -
Update and sync data based on business needs and changes to source data
Data must remain up-to-date in order to be considered accurate and useful for business domains. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure your Customer 360 continuously syncs with underlying source systems. This ensures the customer data that is delivered to internal data consumers is always complete and relevant. -
Expose and deliver customer data to authorized data consumers
Finally, after customer data has been ingested, unified, transformed, cleaned, and prepared, it can be delivered to authorized data consumers to support business. The key here is to support a wide range of data delivery methods, such as Webservices, APIs, streaming and more .
Choosing the Right Technology
The “right” technology likely means different things to different enterprises. It’s easier to identify what’s NOT the right technology: Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Master Data Management (MDM), or Customer Data Platform (CDP). Although each offers value in its own way (CRMs are a must for any enterprise), none of these platforms can provide a true 360-degree view of the customer.
A CRM only handles sales, marketing, and service data, which means valuable data from other source systems and apps are left out. An MDM is great at consolidating data from a variety of sources, but it doesn’t handle data related to customer interactions or transactions. A CDP manages marketing data but lacks support for transactional and master data and doesn’t provide support for data governance (data quality and compliance). It also does not address the needs of customer service, sales and other departments.
When evaluating technologies that promise to provide a single customer view, look for one that:
-
Identifies customer data throughout the IT environment automatically
-
Integrates with all of your existing customer data sources
-
Enables custom configurations, for cleansing and presenting data
-
Offers a fast, self-service approach to accessing customer data
Gaining a Single Customer View With Data Products
As evidenced by the dismal success rate we mentioned at the beginning of this article, having the right technology can make, or break, your ability to achieve a single customer view. Conventional approaches to Customer 360 simply don’t work – but a new, pragmatic methodology – based on data products – does.
A Data Product Platform is based on a data product approach, in which each instance of a customer data product corresponds to a single customer – with all related data stored and managed in its own individually encrypted Micro-Database™.
The platform ensures that authorized data consumers across any business domain can access clean, complete, and compliant customer data in real time, and via self-service. It speeds up data delivery and boosts agility, while ensuring data quality on the fly.
Enterprises don’t need to keep wasting valuable budgets on solutions that have consistently proven they can’t deliver. With a Data Product Platform, you can leverage your existing investments and gain a single customer view – with field-proven Customer 360 use cases – that fulfills its promise, and propels your business forward.
