Peace. Very few people sincerely look for peace. Even fewer find it. And among the ones who do find it, only a fraction strive to sustain it. Its definitions vary. People’s expectations after finding it vary. Yet, there are certain fundamentals that transcend individual perceptions about peace. Health, happiness, family, and monetary stability are some of them.

What is peace doing in a marketing blog?

In a way, Single Customer View (SCV) is very similar to peace. Though every marketer is aware of its magnificence, few try to exploit it. Even fewer succeed. And among the successful few, only a fraction work to maintain it, with new records being created and deleted almost daily. Its names vary. Marketers’ goals around it vary. Yet, there are certain fundamentals that transcend industries and brands about SCV. Correctness, currency, completeness, and consistency are some of them.

So, what is Single Customer View?

Known as 360° View, the Golden Record, Single Source of Truth, or System of Record, Single Customer View is a campaign management function that displays all the marketing data pertaining to a single customer in one place. This includes (but is not limited to) data about:

• Standard prospect information
• Product holding information
• Channel preference information
• Complaint data
• Status information
• Propensity scores
• Campaign history

…and so on.

What data can be collected?

Various handles of your organization can collect vast amounts of partially compartmentalized data. This goes beyond your marketing team. The sales team collects. The product design team collects. Even your customer response team collects. And grouping this data can have powerful outcomes.

Types of data collected from a customer can include:

• Behavioral data: This is the ‘duh’ of the list, and includes web and mobile data. For instance, categories browsed, products interested in, products added to basket, cart abandonment, and so on. Basically, whatever your analytics tool gathers.
• Offline data: This includes addresses, contact information, social media and social network information, and suppression data, among other offline stats.

An advantage of SCV is that it reflects first-party data. It is not from personal identifiers or unrelated anonymous internet surfers. This data pertains to your real customers.

How can you efficiently achieve this?

Before jumping into the plethora of benefits presented by this strategy, let us get familiar with the effective means to actually achieve the view.

• Completeness: Investigate your various data sets. This includes sets from every outwardly focused team in your company. Decide which sets are valuable by weighing the insights you can garner from each. Determine the completeness and eliminate duplicates in individual records.
• Profiling tools: Use a profiling tool to determine the accuracy of the gathered data.
• Data integration: Different touchpoints mean different data. Pull in data from demographics, browsing activity, customer preferences, support team interaction, firmographics, sales team interaction, social media, transactions, and so on.
• Identity matching: Each customer can be assigned a unique identification mark. This can be based on their email address, credit card number, transaction ID, device ID, cookie ID, IP address, agent name, agent ID, account number, company name – the list goes on. Assigning a unique customer ID helps you differentiate users. With this in place, if 10 customers interact with 10 touchpoints, your data won’t look like it came from 100 customers.

Why do we need Single Customer View?

Now, let us look at some of the obvious benefits of this tool.

• Marketing across channels: These days, customers tend to use multiple devices for browsing. They constantly jump from PC to mobile to tablets. With SCV, you can now recreate the whole customer journey, eliminating faulty data sets and duplicate stats. The counterproductive conversion attribution model relying on clicks can be finally done away with.
• Improved targeting: Getting the targeting right is paramount for marketing success. A detailed SCV translates to better compartmentalizing of the targets. Laser-focused categories can be created. Being granular in focusing helps.
• Enhancing the customer experience: Collecting and analyzing every single piece of data from a single customer can enhance the customer experience. You can make sure that an extremely personalized mode of approach is undertaken by the brand in future interactions with that particular customer.

SCV collects all the data of a single customer of your brand, across all channels and platforms, and merges it all into a single record. By doing this, you can get a lucid insight into the various activities of that customer on their mobiles, on your websites – and, in granularly targeted cases, offline too.

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