Data-driven marketers and CRM managers around the world are united by the need to keep up with constantly evolving developments in martech.
Among these, the concept of a single customer view (SCV) stands out as a crucial element for effective marketing and customer relationship management.
Summary
- Definition: A single customer view (SCV) consolidates customer data into a unified record, offering a comprehensive understanding of each customer.
- Importance: An SCV enables personalised marketing, enhances customer service, and supports strategic decision-making.
- Implementation steps: Identify data sources, integrate data, resolve identities, and ensure data quality.
- Challenges: Common obstacles include data silos, inconsistent formats, and ensuring data privacy compliance.
- Benefits: An SCV leads to improved engagement, customer loyalty, and more effective marketing.
But what exactly is a single customer view? And how is it different from a CDP, CRP, DMP, or even a CEP? We’re here to explain the difference! Let’s start at the beginning and why these platforms exist in the first place.
What is a single customer view (SCV)?
A single customer view consolidates all data that a company has on a customer into one unified record — often called the “golden record.”
It’s the culmination of data integration processes, merging records from disparate sources and structuring them into a format accessible across departments.
This holistic view enables companies to offer more meaningful and cohesive customer interactions. In essence, an SCV helps marketers, sales teams, and customer service representatives understand their customers better.
Why is the single customer view important?
According to an Experian report, just one in six UK businesses report having an effective single customer view in place — this despite 85% of organisations reporting that they’ve experienced problems that could’ve been avoided had an SCV been in place.
For marketers, achieving a single customer view offers multiple benefits, which include:
Campaign personalisation |
Centralised customer history |
Enhanced customer experience |
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Personalisation is key for marketers aiming to send the most engaging, relevant messages that encourage purchases or build stronger relationships with their brand.
A single customer view makes this possible by providing a complete, unified view of each customer, allowing for precisely tailored campaigns. |
A single customer view consolidates all customer interactions—such as support tickets, purchase history, and communications—into a single, accessible record. This centralised history enables service teams to quickly access and understand a customer’s past experiences, which makes it easier to anticipate future customer needs. |
With streamlined access to customer information, service teams can resolve issues faster, reducing frustration and enhancing the overall customer experience.
A single customer view empowers teams to deliver seamless, personalised support that boosts satisfaction and loyalty. |
Learn more: Why you need a single customer view
A business can build an SCV by gathering data from multiple sources into one platform, including first-party, second-party, and third-party data from online and offline sources.
By now, you’re probably wondering: isn’t this what a customer data platform (CDP) does?
Single customer view vs customer data platform (CDP)
According to our friends over at G2 Crowd, a customer data platform (CDP) is a tool that consolidates and integrates customer data into a single database. These tools offer marketing teams relevant insights needed to run campaigns.
A CDP must:
- Provide a 360-degree view of the customer
- Gather data from multiple sources into one platform, including first-party, second-party, and third-party data from online and offline sources
- Unify customer profiles across systems
- Connect with other systems to allow marketers to execute campaigns
- Improve targeting for marketing campaigns
However, the single customer view is the actual unified profile that results from this process.
A CDP may produce multiple single customer views depending on departmental needs, such as:
- Marketing SCV: Focuses on engagement and personalisation strategies
- Customer service SCV: Highlights recent interactions and service issues to enhance support
- Sales SCV: Emphasises lead interactions and buying potential
If your organisation’s goal is to achieve a single view of your customers, then a customer data platform is just one of the many marketing technology tools you can use to get there.
For businesses without extensive martech budgets, a marketing automation platform with a focussed SCV might be sufficient for delivering consistent, cross-channel personalised content.
Marketing automation software automates marketing actions or tasks, streamlines marketing workflows, and measures the outcomes of marketing campaigns.
These tools provide a central marketing database for all marketing information and interactions, helping marketers create segmented, personalised, and timely marketing experiences for customers or prospects.
These platforms provide automation features across multiple aspects of marketing including email, SMS, social media, lead generation, direct mail, digital advertising, and more.
5 steps to create a single customer view
For companies looking to implement an SCV, CDP.com offers a basic five-step guide.
1. Define objectives and scope:
Identify the specific goals of the SCV. Are you aiming to improve personalisation, optimise support, or gain insights into customer behaviours?
2. Identify and gather data sources:
Catalogue all internal and external sources of customer data to ensure a comprehensive view. These may include CRM systems, loyalty programs, web analytics, and third-party data sources.
3. Select an appropriate data platform:
Choose a data platform that meets your organisation’s needs. Customer data platforms (CDPs) are a popular choice for creating a single view of customers. However, CRMs, data warehouses, and marketing automation platforms can also work, depending on resources and objectives.
4. Apply identity resolution techniques:
Use advanced algorithms to match data points and reconcile customer records. Some platforms use machine learning to improve the accuracy of this process, ensuring that all interactions are linked to the correct customer profile.
5. Maintain and update data quality:
SCVs require ongoing data validation to remain accurate and relevant. Set up processes for data cleansing, deduplication, and enrichment.
Magnet Trade uses SCV data to increase survey response rates
Magnet Trade leveraged an SCV supported by RedEye to personalise SMS content, complementing email campaigns and boosting survey response rates by 33%.
Using SCV data, the company tailored messages to each customer’s journey, enhancing engagement and providing valuable insights that helped refine the post-purchase experience for trade clients.
Read the full case study
Challenges in building a single view of customers
Achieving a complete SCV is complex and can present various challenges:
Data silos and integration issues:
Legacy systems and fragmented databases often hold data in isolation, making integration difficult. Addressing these silos requires an investment in data architecture and sometimes an organisational shift in data governance.
Data privacy and compliance:
SCVs often involve handling personal customer data, which brings compliance requirements like GDPR and CCPA into play. Businesses must establish clear data management policies and may need to obtain customer consent for data use.
Inconsistent data quality:
Disparate data sources can lead to inconsistent, incomplete or duplicated data. A strong data governance framework and regular data validation processes are essential for maintaining SCV quality.
Resource requirements:
Implementing and maintaining an SCV requires substantial resources, including technology, time, and skilled personnel. Smaller organisations may find this challenging, which is why we recommend choosing scalable solutions.
Industry applications of SCV tools: Key benefits across sectors
Different industries leverage the SCV in unique ways to meet their specific needs:
Ecommerce and retailers:An SCV can enable retailers to build highly personalised shopping experiences, recommend relevant products, and nurture loyalty.
Travel, hotels and transport: Unified customer data can connect data from bookings, preferences, and past stays to enable seamless, personalised experiences.
Sports clubs and associations: SCV solutions for sports clubs can consolidate member interactions and event attendance, allowing organisations to engage members with personalised content, track participation, and improve retention.
Automotive and car dealerships: A single view of customer can allow dealerships to centralise customer interactions across sales and service visits, enabling personalised recommendations and timely follow-ups.
Non-profits and charities: An SCV can empower charities to build deeper connections with donors through targeted, personalised engagement. With donor automation specialists, non-profits can leverage SCV data to understand donor history, communicate more effectively, and increase support.
Museums and attractions: SCV solutions can help museums and attractions boost engagement and visitor loyalty by enabling seamless integration of booking, feedback, and visit data, leading to a higher likelihood of repeat visits and bookings.
Further and higher education: SCV tools can support recruitment drives in educational institutions by consolidating prospective student data and engagement history. This helps admissions teams tailor communications and outreach efforts, resulting in higher conversion rates.
How to measure single customer view success: Key metrics to track
Evaluating the impact of a single customer view solution is essential to ensure it’s meeting business objectives. Metrics to consider include:
Customer retention rate: An increase in customer retention can indicate successful personalisation and engagement efforts.
Customer lifetime value (CLV): A higher CLV suggests that the SCV is helping maintain long-term customer relationships and repeat purchases.
Campaign response rate: SCV tools should ideally lead to better-targeted marketing efforts, resulting in higher engagement rates.
Customer satisfaction score (CSAT): SCV solutions can enhance customer service quality, which is reflected in higher satisfaction scores.
Wait, you also talked about CRMs, DMP and CEP earlier
Well remembered! The martech industry is flooded with solutions that try to convince marketers to buy the next shiny object. Most of these solutions fall into three broad categories: CRMs, DMPs and CEPs.
Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms
You’ll be most aware, and likely comfortable, with CRMs. Every business needs one and it’s at the core of business operations. They are great at integrating into other systems! CRMs will always feed into a CDP and/or a marketing automation provider. However, they are not able to collect and unify standalone databases.
With CRMs, you’ll often encounter duplicate record error messaging, which stops any transfer unless manually intervened. They are used best for managing customer interactions but provide limited reporting or segmentation possibilities.
Data management platforms (DMP)
These are slightly older tech and don’t appear as much these days as first-party data takes over the narrative.
They primarily use third-party data that cannot always be verified, like first-party data. It’s usually anonymous data which is only stored for short periods of time. DMPs are most commonly used for digital and display advertising networks.
Customer engagement platforms (CEP):
CEPs are arguably the newest entry on this list; they are often used by vendors who want to position themselves differently within the crowded CDP marketplace.
Engagement sounds way more exciting than data, but on the surface, it’s just another three-letter acronym for a CDP.
Whatever your choice of solution, building a single customer view is a powerful way for businesses to unify their customer data, deliver personalised experiences, and drive brand loyalty.
An effective SCV tool enables seamless engagement across marketing, sales, and customer service, providing comprehensive insights into customer behaviour and preferences.
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