single customer view case study

Three brand case studies on creating a single customer view

Even in the UK where online shopping is at its highest (compared to offline), the percentage of transactions that happen online is around 13%. 

Which basically means that 87% of purchases happen offline and therefore 87% of purchase data potentially goes uncaptured.

As I clarified in What is the single customer view (SCV) and why do you need it? a SCV provides businesses with the ability to track customers and their communications across every channel, offline and online.

The obvious benefits of this include much improved customer service levels, better customer retention, higher conversion rates and an improved overall customer lifetime value (CLV). 

If brands are to have any hope in obtaining a true SCV, they will have to think of ways to join the dots between offline retail and digital so they can capture that remaining 87% of purchase data.

Using our downloadable report Single Customer View: Myth or Reality? and our case study database let’s take a look at a few brands who are working to achieve this.

Club Clarins was set up by cosmetics company Clarins more than two years ago as a way to tackle the gap between retail and online and of course to help build SCV. 

The scheme is a simple but effective way to incentivise customers to hand over purchase-history data online after they’ve purchased a Clarins product in a department store.

Club Clarins then offers the opportunity to redeem special gifts and sample sets reserved just for ‘VIPs’, track your purchases, rewards, and earn points.

Registrants enter a UPC barcode from the product into the Clarins website, then once a customer hits a reward threshold, they can begin redeeming points.

The ‘VIP’ angle is a little misleading, as anyone can sign up, and you don’t have to buy a product first. 

However as a high-end cosmetics brand with heritage, it’s easy for Clarins to create the impression of exclusivity that its customers want to be a part of.

United Airlines

After merging with Continental Airlines in 2012, United Airlines needed to integrate the two companies’ websites. At the same time, United implemented tag management, to ensure that its analytics and marketing pixel tagging was accurate, and ultimately work towards a single customer view across all channels.

At the time of the merger, United Airlines had no testing program. The company enlisted the help of Ensighten to unify tagging across every digital touchpoint, including mobile apps and kiosks. 

This enabled United to deploy new tests within a matter of weeks, while also proving that the tests had no negative impact on the website.

The airline had limited IT resources but it was able to run an optimisation program to increase agility. The Data Layer unified all customer data, enabling United Airlines to have cleaner data, greater consistency across applications, and to eliminate data silos.

United Airlines was able to boost its marketing ROI by improving its analytics and optimisation programmes, unifying customer data and enable greater mobile marketing agility.

The project delivered eight-digit ROI within 10 months and, as Michael Venditti, manager of data strategy & infrastructure at United Airlines said, the work “unified our data and provided a 360-degree view of the customer.”

Speciality Fashion Group

Speciality Fashion Group (SFG) is Australia’s largest retailer of women’s fashion. The company wanted to give its various brands access to customer insights through real-time reporting and ad-hoc analytics, to enable responsive, data-driven marketing campaigns.

Over the course of three months, SFG worked with SDL to implement a campaign and analytics project which saw it streamline marketing processes, and enabled the organisation to deliver personalised, targeted communications based on the behaviour of individual customers.

With real-time reporting SFG was also able to deliver accurate business updates for weekly executive meetings, providing important insights to decision makers.

A member who shops both online and in-store is worth 2.6 times more than in-store-only members. SFG captures online behavioural data to merge with customer data, where it can be analysed and pushed to stores to support cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.

Production times for electronic direct mail (EDM) was reduced from 24 hours to less than two hours. Since implementing the solution, the most recent 200 EDM campaigns delivered an ROI of 2,200%, as well as the following:

• EDM open rate uplift of 12% on industry benchmarks 
• EDM click-through rate uplift of 44% against industry benchmarks 
• Increase in email member contribution to sales from 32.4% to 45.7%
• Average campaign ROI of over 1,800%

For many more similar case studies covering a range of topics, check out our case study library , and for more information on SCV download our report Single Customer View: Myth or Reality .

Leave a comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.

6 Steps to Build a Single Customer View & Improve Customer Experience

Updated: June 21, 2021

Published: June 18, 2021

Ever see those cool 360-degree cameras on red carpets at award shows?

Someone famous will stand in the middle and several cameras positioned all around will simultaneously capture pictures of the star, creating a spectacular image that gives you a 360 view of the person.

Now, imagine if you could do that with your target audience? Capture them from all angles as they interact with your brand. With a single customer view, you can.

The issue is, many businesses struggle to know where to start.

At the end of this article, you’ll understand what a single customer view is and how to create one for your brand.

What is a single customer view?

Single customer view (SCV) is a centralized platform where you can have a holistic view of your customers across the entire buyer’s journey. With an SCV, you can identify and track every interaction you have with current and prospective customers, which enables you to develop relevant and targeted strategies.

A single customer view combines data from a consumer’s behavior on web and email, social media activity, demographics, interactions with customer service, and purchase history.

Let’s go through an example of an interaction between a consumer and a brand.

A consumer, let’s call her Jazmyn, discovers a brand on Instagram. Jazmyn visits the brand’s website through Instagram and downloads a free offer. Said brand adds Jazmyn to an email list and she starts receiving nurturing emails.

After months of no interactions, Jazmyn rediscovers the brand and makes a purchase. A month after that, she calls customer service regarding an issue with her product.

In just a few months, Jazmyn has interacted with at least three departments within the company: marketing, sales, and customer service. In many businesses, every department tracks data using its own system.

For instance, sales teams often use customer relationship management (CRM) software to track their interactions with clients and prospects while marketing teams use marketing platforms and automation tools to generate leads.

This creates huge data gaps, making it difficult to understand how a user is behaving over an extended period of time beyond a single vertical. It can also lead to duplicate information, leading to dirty data.

For instance, Jazmyn might receive ads for products she’s already purchased. Or she may get a call from customer service asking about a product she’s already reviewed via email.

Having a single customer view allows organizations to build personalized interactions with consumers, based on their current stage in the customer lifecycle. This creates a better customer experience, stronger brand loyalty, and better retention rates.

When you know where your target audience is, you can make enticing offers based on their current needs. It’s personalization at its best.

Benefits of a Single Customer View

When you invest in a platform with a single customer view, you:

• Have cleaner data – With an integrated system, you remove information silos, which often cause data duplication.
• Gather better insights – When you have an accurate map of the customer journey, you can better understand how your campaigns are performing and identify areas of improvement.
• Assign proper credit to the right channels – Proper attribution is a major issue when it comes to audience tracking. With an SCV, you can identify the best and worst-performing channels for future campaigns.

How to Create a Single Customer View

• Align your data owners and your KPIs.
• Find the right tech.
• Hire data managers.
• Sort and integrate all data from your legacy systems.
• Set your data governance strategy.
• Test your processes.

1. Align your data owners and your KPIs.

The first step in creating an SCV is aligning all your data owners across your organization.

It’s important to align your teams early on key targets and key progress indicators . This keeps everyone on the same page and striving toward the same goal.

So, although everyone will be working on different sections, they’ll all be contributing to the same objective. This is key in keeping everyone in the same mindset and easing the transition to a data-driven approach.

Your data owners will serve as liaisons between IT and your team, enforcing governance standards and supplying IT with the access they need.

During this process, your IT team will be instrumental, as they will need to consolidate data from multiple systems and sources.

2. Find the right tech.

The next step is finding a platform with the capabilities to support your company’s needs.

Key features to consider when searching for a platform include:

• Usability and accessibility of software
• CRM Integration
• Data quality tools

You’ll also want to consider the size of your company and the scalability of the software. all-in-one CRM platform like HubSpot , which combines sales, marketing, customer service data to support a holistic customer experience.

3. Hire data managers.

Depending on your company size, you may want to onboard roles dedicated to data, such as data miners, data analysts, and data migration specialists.

The process of migrating data is a costly and time-consuming one that you may not be equipped for. Instead, hire experts with the knowledge and experience to do it right.

They will be essential not only during the initial building phase but also as you grow your customer base.

4. Sort and integrate all data from your legacy systems.

If you’re an established brand with a ton of scattered data, you’ll need to sort through your systems.

Start by conducting an audit of your data quality. From there, clean your data so you can start integrating it with your other systems, including:

• Your data warehouse
• Your point-of-sale systems
• Your marketing automation systems
• Your call center systems

5. Set your data governance strategy.

As you’re in the process of cleaning out old data, you’ll need a new system for new, incoming data.

This is where your data governance standards come into play. They serve as operating guidelines for retrieving, storing, and processing data.

You may wonder, what’s the difference between a data management strategy and a data governance strategy? The former refers to the actions you take to fulfill the guidelines outlined in your governance strategy.

To learn about how to develop a governance strategy, click here .

6. Test your processes.

The last step in this process is testing your new centralized system.

To ensure that your new environment works (i.e., that the data linkage is complete), some test data will need to be used to ensure the data is gathered, stored, and reported correctly on your platform.

This will likely be an ongoing process as your business scales and you implement new touchpoints.

The earlier your team can implement a single customer view framework, the better equipped you will be to serve your target audience. While the process can be expensive and time-consuming, it’s a worthwhile investment that will be instrumental in making strategic business decisions.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

Everything You Need to Know About Behavioral Segmentation [+ Examples]

Everything You Need to Know About Marketing Operations in One Place

What Is Content Operations? A Straight-Forward Guide

15 Automation Ideas for Delivering Excellent HR Support

Predictive Lead Scoring: What It Is and Why It's Important

Marketing vs. Operations: The Battle for a Small Business' Attention

Everything You Need to Know About Segmentation Bases 

What is Lead to Account Matching, and Why It Matters

Marketing Qualified Lead: Everything You Need to Know About MQLs

What Is Attribution Modeling and Why It’s So Important

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Marketing software that helps you drive revenue, save time and resources, and measure and optimize your investments — all on one easy-to-use platform

• Awards and Recognition
• Board of Directors
• Client Stories
• Corporate Social Responsibility
• Diversity, Equity and Inclusion
• Protecting Our Planet
• Enabling People to Outperform
• Caring for Our Communities
• Ethics, Integrity and Compliance
• Delivering Value to Our Clients
• From the CEO
• South Africa
• United States
• The Philippines
• United Arab Emirates
• United Kingdom
• Management Team
• Press Releases
• WNS in the News
• Our Proposition
• Vision and Mission
• Generative AI
• ESG Analytics
• Augmented Data Management and Data Governance
• BI & Visualization
• Big Data Engineering
• Data Governance Intelligent Cloud
• Data Sciences
• Embedded Analytics
• Fraud And Risk Analytics
• HR Data Analytics
• Customer Loyalty Analytics
• Marketing Analytics Services
• Insurance Analytics
• Retail Media
• Centers of Excellence
• Customer Experience Consulting
• HIFFI – Home Insurance in a Jiffy
• Digitally Simulated Training Environment
• WNS Open Talent
• Decision Support
• Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A)
• CFO Advisory Services
• WNS Duplicate Invoice Detector
• WNS Forecaster and Predictor
• WNS Journal Entry Analytics
• WNS Risk and Audit Analytics
• WNS Working Capital Analytics
• Outperforming CFO Framework (OCF)
• Procure-to-Pay (P2P)
• Quote-to-Sustain (QtS)
• WNS TRAC eClose
• Anti-Money Laundering and Know Your Customer
• Financial Crime
• Fraud and Risk Analytics
• Fraud Management Services
• Regulatory Compliance and Risk Reporting
• Third-Party Risk Management
• Compensation
• HR Analytics
• Learning and Performance Management
• Payroll Administration
• Recruitment Services
• Workforce Management
• Legal Services
• Category Management
• Contracting Services
• Digital Solutions
• Procure-To-Pay Services
• Sourcing Services
• Supplier Management
• Supply Chain Management
• Robotics & Digital Automation TRAC
• Supplier Portal
• Technology Services
• WNS IP Labs
• Insurance TRAC
• RPA & Intelligent Automation TRAC
• Security TRAC
• Travel TRAC
• Analytics Incubation Center
• Big Data Analytics
• Data Sciences Group
• Process Maturity Model
• Value Innovation Program
• WNS Transition
• Workforce And Productivity Management
• Industry Segments
• Capital Markets Operations
• Research and Analysis Services
• Trade Finance
• Financial Crime and Compliance (FCC)
• FinTech Services
• Mortgage Operations
• Retail Banking
• Banking Analytics
• Banking and Financial Services Consulting
• Credit Risk Management and Underwriting Services
• Customer Experience in BFS
• Finance & Accounting for Banks & Financial Institutions
• Governance, Risk and Compliance
• Model Risk Management
• Customer Acquisition and Customer Experience Management Services
• Driving Insight-led Decisions
• Realizing Your Energy and Utility Digital Transformation Goals
• Carbon Accounting
• Digital Customer Experience Services
• Digital Meter-to-Cash
• Smart Collection and Debt Management Services
• Elevating Business Operations with Shared Services
• Customer Management Services
• Energy & Utilities Analytics
• Shared Services
• Customer Analytics
• Data Management
• Revenue Assurance
• Risk Analytics
• Video and Voice AI Solution
• Benefits Administration
• Clinical Operations
• Healthcare Claims
• Medical Bill Review
• Member Engagement Services
• Provider Lifecycle Management
• Revenue Cycle Management
• Telehealth Services
• Content and Information Publishers
• Executive Search Services
• Internet and Social Media
• ID and Background Verification Firms
• Legal Service Firms
• Real Estate Services
• Risk and Compliance Service Providers
• Design Services
• Hi-Tech & Professional Services Analytics
• Product Data Operations
• Revenue Operations
• Pension Risk Transfer
• Lloyd’s of London Market
• Claims Prevention
• Straight-through Processing (STP)
• Subrogation Services
• Insurance Finance & Accounting
• WNS Claims 360
• Voice AI Solution
• Finance and Accounting
• Procurement
• Research and Analytics
• Medical Affairs
• Pharmacovigilance
• Competitive Intelligence
• Forecasting
• Business Intelligence
• Marketing & Pricing Analytics
• Sales Analytics
• Commercial Assessment

Customer Experience

• Finance & Accounting
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• CPG & Retail Analytics
• Integrated Sales Order Management
• Forwarders and Brokers
• Safety and Compliance
• WNS Air Cargo Optimized Solutions Suite (ACOSS)
• WNS Document Verification Solution
• WNS Volume Surge Solution
• Hospitality Companies
• Online Travel Agencies
• Travel Management Companies
• Travel and Leisure Analytics
• WNS Ancillary Revenue Optimizer Suite
• WNS Post-booking Servicing Solution
• Verifare Plus
• WNS and HFS Research Travel and Hospitality Market Impact Report
• Private Equity
• WNS Co-creation Labs

Perspectives

Enhancing Business Outcomes with Unified Customer View

21 november 2022.

A WNS Perspective

• A leading retailer struggled to achieve a unified customer view, as critical data resided in silos across scattered point-of-sale systems.
• The client also wanted to improve marketing and commercial decisions through analytics-led insights.
• WNS Analytics – our data, analytics and AI practice – co-created an analytics center of excellence to help the retailer realize the full potential of data and drive insights-led business outcomes.

This is our story of enabling a leading retailer to improve customer engagement, loyalty and basket sizes.

As we know…

Consumer expectations and buying behaviors are changing quickly, requiring retailers to evolve their strategies and operations accordingly. Thus, customer analytics can play a more significant role in business operations, helping explore opportunities to enhance customer experience at every touch point. With the rising cost of customer acquisition, retention and loyalty strategies have also become critical.

The challenge for the client was…

To better understand buying behaviors as customers shopped across different stores using various loyalty and tender cards. This resulted in important customer data such as demographic data, loyalty data and campaign response behavior residing in silos in dispersed Point-of-Sale (POS) systems, making a unified view of the customer inaccessible for insights-based decision-making.

The company also wanted to make better marketing and commercial decisions, as the strategies used for store assortment, campaigns and loyalty benefits were judgment-based. There needed to be a quantitative analysis of marketing and campaign performance, with improved visibility into changing customer needs.

Moreover, the company needed access to multi-skilled teams to roll out a data strategy and analytics practice that would function consistently and deliver business outcomes.

As the co-creation partner…

We leveraged Consulting , the consulting arm of WNS Analytics , to understand the client’s as-is process, identify the gaps and implement an end-to-end strategy. This led to the setting up of the analytics Center of Excellence (CoE) for the sales and marketing function, which helped achieve the following objectives:

Business analytics and insights: Provide actionable insights on shopper behavior, campaign performance and commercial impact

Data engineering: Create and maintain a data pipeline to capture 360-degree customer data with a self-serving model and dashboards

Advanced analytics: Use data science and statistical techniques to implement use cases such as customer segmentation, customer value prediction and churn prediction

Program management: Propose, prioritize and execute business use cases across all the above workstreams

The client achieved significant analytical milestones, including…

Creating a single customer ID for transactions across loyalty and payment cards

Creating a cloud-based 360-degree customer data repository that captured transactions, campaign responses, demographic data and loyalty data

Enabling self-serve analytics for business users

Providing analytics-based actionable insights into shopping baskets, loyalty and promotional offers, and campaign performance

Executing advanced analytics use cases for customer segmentation, next best offer, customer value prediction, churn prediction and cross-sell recommendations

Through systematic data-driven decisions, actionable insights and advanced decision support models, WNS helped the client realize the full power of data and achieve impactful business outcomes. These included:

Additional revenue of USD 478 Mn due to effective personalization

Significant reduction in promo spending

Increased sales due to accurate predictions, hyper-personalization and optimization strategies

About WNS Analytics:

WNS Analytics powers business growth and innovation for 120+ global companies with data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI). Driven by a specialized team of over 4000 analysts, data scientists and domain experts, WNS Analytics helps translate data into actionable insights for impactful decision-making. Built on the pillars of consulting ( Consulting ), future-ready platforms ( AI Platforms ), and domain and technology ( Centers of Excellence ), WNS Analytics seamlessly blends strategy, industry-specific nuances, AI and Machine Learning (ML) operations, and intelligent cloud platforms.

Driving a futuristic edge are WNS Analytics modular cloud-based platforms and solutions leveraging advanced AI and ML to provide end-to-end integration and processing of data to actionable insights. WNS Analytics leverages the combined strength of WNS’ domain expertise, co-creation labs, strategic partnerships and outcome-based engagement models.

Join the conversation

Related To:

Similar perspectives, key holiday shopping trends 2022 for retail success.

25 November 2022

Re-imagining Customer Loyalty: Insights from the CX Retail…

09 August 2023

Investing in User Experience Makes Business Sense

24 January 2022

For Merchandisers

For Data-Driven Execs

Integrations

Use our integrations to easily connect and move data between your technologies and systems.

Technology Partners

With our partnered solutions, you get access to additional services and technologies to solve customer problems.

Become a Partner

Bloomreach is the leader in ecommerce personalization solutions — join our partner ecosystem to unlock limitless potential.

For Industries

For Customers

For Getting Started

Case Studies

Optimize Performance

Get Expert Insights

The Edge Summit

New York & London, September 2024

For Marketers

There Is No Upgrade From Bloomreach

Find the perfect package for your business. Unify all your customer and product data and deliver connected customer experiences with our commerce-specific products

Book a demo with one of our experts

About Bloomreach

Innovation Hub

Life With Bloomreach

Watch this video to learn what your life could look like when you use Bloomreach.

Home Library A Single Customer View (SCV): Everything You Need to Know

A Single Customer View (SCV): Everything You Need to Know

• Dec 26, 2023
• 12 min read

The term single customer view (SCV) has been bandied about in marketing circles for over a decade. It’s something that is often referenced and is vital for a business’ marketing and sales efforts.

But mentioning a term isn’t the same as understanding it fully, which many have trouble doing with a SCV. Obtaining a complete view of the customer calls for an immense amount of data collected and organized in the right way, which isn’t an easy thing to do. And with a host of variables that can go into the process (how the data is sourced, identity resolution, the speed of profile updates, etc.) it’s hard to lock down a universal definition that sums it up in a short, simple way.

That’s why we’re diving deep into what a unified customer view is, how your business can use it, and why it is so important for ecommerce businesses to use to optimize the customer journey. Keep reading to learn everything there is to know.

• An SCV is a database with customer profiles (containing accurate data points like their purchase history, site activity, product recommendations, etc.) for every individual person who interacts with your business.
• Single customer view data is used to manage customer segmentation and marketing automation campaigns.
• Your SCV allows you to optimize the customer journey and understand how to personalize marketing communications for customers.

What Is a Single Customer View?

In the age of  digital commerce , there’s never been more information for marketers to use to create effective campaigns. But there’s also never been more important data points to keep track of. 

With customers shopping and purchasing from multiple different devices and the universal move toward  omnichannel communication , a method of cataloging all that data is required for ecommerce businesses. 

At its simplest, a single customer view solves this problem —  a single customer view is a database with customer profiles (containing accurate data points like their purchase history, site activity, product recommendations, etc.) for every individual person who interacts with your business.

But not all single customer views are created equal. A true single customer view is more than just a customer database that can store customer data. It needs to be scalable, flexible, and updated in real time so your marketing team can offer the best possible customer experience.

That last point is a crucial difference. SCV data is used to enable  segmentation  and  marketing automation  — if the system is out of date, your customers could be seeing the wrong messages. Despite this, many companies that claim to offer a single customer view still manage their data with a rigid framework and time-delayed updates, which can be detrimental to marketing efforts.

To fully understand the important need for a unified source of data, let’s break down the different types of data needed to make SCVs work. Then we’ll walk through the history of customer data management that led to the single customer view, the biggest benefits that businesses can get from a holistic view of their  customer journey , and actionable examples of a true single customer view in use.

Collecting Customer Data for a Unified Customer View

To create a holistic, unified view of your customers, you need to be able to collect data from a range of sources, including:

• Behavioral data:  All the relevant interactions like clicks, preferences and filters picked, and time spent on page that a customer has with your brand. You need data on the categories and products they favor, the products they’ve added to a basket, and the searches they’ve abandoned. 
• Customer relationship and offline data sources:  This includes all the pertinent personal information, including any data that you might need to complete a purchase or reach your customer through marketing channels. This includes data such as a postal address, telephone number, email address, social media channels, etc.
• Transactional data:  This encompasses all the purchases that your customer has made with your business, like products purchased, the volume of each purchase, order values, product returns, and so on.
• Data on GDPR consent acquisitions : Your business is responsible for keeping track of  consent management  for each customer, ensuring your brand is GDPR-compliant.

Optimizing the Customer Journey With a Single Customer View

With so many different data sets and customer profiles to manage, maintaining a single customer view can be a real challenge for businesses. But there are several benefits to collecting data in a SCV. 

A Centralized Place for All Your Data 

First, a unified customer view helps to ensure data quality by providing a centralized data repository. Each customer’s data points are directed towards a single, interconnected profile, which makes sure you don’t have siloed data getting lost in the cracks between different marketing channels, touchpoints, and customer interactions.

This can be helpful for businesses that rely on data from multiple sources, especially with multiple channels as well as online and offline data to organize. 

A Holistic View of Every Customer

A SCV offers a complete, 360-degree view of your relationship with your customers. This can help inform marketing decisions by providing a complete picture of who they are, what they want, and how they’re connections with your brand can grow with future interactions. 

For modern businesses looking to  personalize their marketing  for their unique audience, a single customer view is crucial. It provides context and insights that can help businesses tailor marketing messages to meet the exact needs of their customers. Without a SCV, truly personalized marketing is next to impossible.

Improved Customer Service

Finally, a SCV can help improve customer service by providing a more complete view of the customer’s interaction with the company. This can help businesses identify opportunities to improve the shopping experience and customer satisfaction.

Overall, collecting data in a single customer view can be beneficial for businesses in terms of data quality, helping brands make more informed marketing decisions and offer prospective customers and loyal patrons the best customer service.

Why Real-Time Data Is Vital for a Single Customer View

To understand the need for a unified customer view and its vital relationship with up-to-the-minute data, let’s take a look at the history of data management and how the digital landscape evolved into the data-rich era we live in now.

The History of Database Management Systems

In the 1970s, when the internet was in its infancy, companies began storing their customer data using  relational database management   (RDBM) systems. These data warehouse systems allowed companies to store data as individual pieces of information in different fields (first name, last name, customer ID, etc.), and then access that data through SQL queries. As the popularity of computers continued to climb, this method of managing customer information became the standard and fueled better and more targeted marketing campaigns.

The internet continued to grow, and  companies continued to invest in their RDBM systems.  These systems could still handle the customer information being gathered, and most companies saw no need to change their methods.

That was the case  until about 2008, when  big data  started hitting hard.  Suddenly, data was the most important resource for businesses and marketers, and the sheer amount of customer information that could be gathered increased exponentially. The formerly superior RDBM systems could no longer efficiently handle all the details.

The Need for a Single Customer View

The idea of a unified customer view was born then out of necessity. Customer data was far richer and more detailed than ever before. Customers were starting to make purchases from all different directions: in-store sales transactions, purchases on their phones, buying on tablets and PCs. All that customer data was going to different places, often managed by different departments, and even using different software.

There was more and more danger of data duplication and inaccurate data being assigned to customer identities because  there was no way to effectively track the customer throughout their lifecycle and communicate with them in a relevant way.

Introduction of NoSQL Databases

Non-relational (NoSQL) databases began to be seen as the best solution to the siloed customer data problem.  NoSQL is built to handle large amounts of unstructured data. It’s more flexible, scalable, and faster than SQL  when dealing with something like big data.

Unlike SQL, NoSQL systems can track any piece of data at any time, with no need to prepare the structure for it. New data sources can be tracked without the need to set anything up, and the system is much less likely to produce duplicate data. 

In short,  NoSQL was better for using the data these companies now had access to.

Unfortunately, decades had been spent building relational databases   — countless personnel hours and piles of cash — and this widespread system was now showing its limitations.   In addition to the previously mentioned issues of collecting more detailed data and customers that connect through multiple devices, all methods for the company to interact with customers were disconnected as well.   Customer relationship management (CRM) systems were in one data silo, email management was in another, analytics in a third, and on and on.

The legacy companies that had invested early on in relational database management (Oracle, IBM, Emarsys) were now at a disadvantage. With all the time and money spent on their now out-of-date RDBM systems, they couldn’t just start over from scratch.

Instead, they tried to convert their relational databases into non-relational databases (NoSQL). This required pushing together a number of different data silos and pointing them all in the direction of the customer, hardcoding something that looks like a single customer view but doesn’t function with the same flexibility or speed.

How Did Bloomreach Solve the Single Customer View?

Bloomreach acquired Exponea in 2021  and now offers  the world’s #1 Commerce Experience Cloud . 

Rather than altering existing tech to face a new problem, Bloomreach had the opportunity to look at the problem first, then create the tech around it.  As soon as a customer interacts with your company, you need to qualify them and take action in that exact moment.  

This approach allowed Bloomreach to create a truly customer-centric system:  an all-in-one customer data platform built around NoSQL, rather than one adapted to work around the limitations of relational datadabes.

Bloomreach Engagement allows businesses to collect all customer data relevant for activation in a single place so you can power personalization efforts across the entire customer journey. 

No matter what data point you gain — whether it’s on-site data, back-end data, offline data, calculated metrics, or predicted future data — your single customer view reflects customer behavior with your brand.  It’s the key to utilizing customer insights, segments, and attributes in real time and creating personalized experiences at scale .

Bloomreach Engagement brings the essential marketing tools together with this unique 360-degree customer view. You get a CRM system, email management platform, campaign building and automation capabilities, real-time predictions, analytics, and more, all available within one dashboard.

Plus, the same data that powers all your efforts is constantly updating — so fast that you can actually watch a customer profile update itself as the customer clicks around.

But it’s not just about speed.  The flexibility of this customer-centric system, built around NoSQL and using an  in-memory framework , creates new opportunities for communicating with customers.  With a system parsing each individual action that every customer takes in real time, Bloomreach has developed powerful customer recommendations that adapt and interact with the customer, even as they browse the site.

Picture it like this: with legacy systems, you get dropped in the ocean on a scraped-together raft made from what’s floating around you. It keeps you from drowning for now, but it’s not ideal.

With  Bloomreach Engagement , you’re on a boat designed for the ocean. Not only does it keep you afloat, it’s the optimal method for navigating the seas.

Finally, another advantage of an all-in-one platform is how quickly the software can be implemented.  Bloomreach’s basic software can be set up and running within days.  The most barebones version can be installed in minutes, as it only requires a single code integration.

Compare that to the weeks or months required to integrate all the disparate parts of a legacy company and it’s easy to see the full benefits of Bloomreach Engagement.

Understanding a Single Customer View

• In the simplest sense, a single customer view is a database of customer profiles (one for every user) composed of purchase history, site activity, product recommendations, etc.
• A true single customer view is a valuable resource, letting businesses utilize real-time data to enable personalized customer journeys, detailed segmentation, advanced predictive analytics, and more.
• NoSQL (non-relational) databases are superior to relational databases when dealing with large sets of detailed data (i.e., big data).
• Not all single customer views are equal — most legacy companies run their SCVs on converted relational databases, creating a slower, less-flexible single customer view than one built around a NoSQL database from the beginning.
• Bloomreach Engagement ‘s single customer view is built around NoSQL. It’s flexible, updates in real time, and combines CRM, email management, campaign building and automation, real-time predictions, analytics, and more into one main dashboard. It will allow you to personalize customer experiences for your valued consumers. 

With the power of a single customer view, your marketing efforts can offer the one-to-one personalization that today’s customers crave from their favorite businesses. It’s an essential tool for any digital marketer looking to get ahead in the modern digital landscape. 

Read This Next: Ecommerce Personalization: Your Complete Guide

• Privacy and Security

Samuel Kellett

Sam leads the content team at Bloomreach, where he manages the production of ecommerce articles and case studies, as well as the content for webinars and events. With his background in screenwriting and theatre, Sam brings a unique perspective to his role as Bloomreach’s head of content. Sam’s passion is storytelling: he is constantly exploring new and creative ways to explain complex topics.

Table of Contents

Share with your community, maintain an edge with these new posts.

• Personalization

How to Create an Omnichannel Customer Engagement Strategy

The Ultimate Guide to the Omnichannel Customer Journey

• AI , Personalization

What To Know About Using Live Chat for Ecommerce

Subscribe to get our hot takes on ecommerce topics, trends and innovations delivered to straight your inbox., explore more resources.

Tune in to our Commerce Experience podcast series.

Read up on the latests in AI, commerce and personalization.

Become inspired with our collection of use cases.

Join our virtual events covering popular topics.

Find an in-person event to meet the Bloomreach team.

Read a number of guides covering best practices.

Analyst Reports

See how we stack up according to analysts.

Marketing Automation

Personalize marketing in real-time across email, sms, app, website, and more.

Product Discovery

Ecommerce search and merchandising focused on maximizing revenue.

Unified Data Platform

Customer & product data management, integrations and advanced analytics for omnichannell personalization.

London & New York, Sep 2024

Find the perfect package for your business. Unify all your customer and product data and deliver connected customer experiences with our three commerce-specific products.

Book a call with one of our experts

• Help Center

A single customer view: what it is & how it works

A single view of the customer puts all different pieces of customer information together into one coherent, up-to-date whole for your entire organization.

In an old Indian parable, several blind men get to touch an elephant. Each man feels a different part of the animal. Afterward, they each describe the elephant, but their accounts vary, depending on what they touched—the tusk, tail, or perhaps a leg. They get confused and angry with each other because of the discrepancies in their description, but eventually learn that the elephant is a large animal with many parts. All their stories are true. Each just forms one piece of the whole.

Departments in many organizations have a similarly fragmented understanding of their customers. Ninety percent of people now travel across different devices and touchpoints to complete a task and generate lots of data along the way. Legacy systems like CRMs often can't process and sync this information in real-time in a central location. So it's as if teams face a herd of elephants and rely on an intermediary to touch one of them. They then need to decipher secondhand stories to figure out what part of which elephant they're dealing with and whether the animal ran off in the meantime.

A single view of the customer resolves this situation. It puts all the different pieces of customer information together into one coherent, up-to-date whole. To show you how to implement such a view within your organization, we'll discuss:

What is a single customer view?

What are the benefits of having a single customer view, four obstacles to creating a single customer view, how to create a unified customer view.

What a unified customer view looks like in Segment

FAQs about the single customer view

A single customer view means you have one location for every individual you do business with that provides an overview of all the data you’ve collected on them. Usually, this view takes the form of a profile page in a Customer Data Platform (CDP) or customer relationship management (CRM) system.

You need to capture customer data in real time across all your channels and internal systems to create a single customer view. This information can come from sources like your website, in-store sales transactions, marketing tools, social media channels, and customer service interactions. Once collected, you need to clean, synthesize, and store this data in a central location, where every team and tool can instantly access it without the involvement of engineers or analysts.

The single customer view should sit at the heart of your business. It gives all departments valuable information to improve their performance. Executives, for example, have more accurate data to make decisions, marketers to deliver more profitable campaigns, and customer support agents to solve issues faster.

Deliver truly personalized marketing across channels

You can only deliver personalization based on data that's up to date and relevant. If it's not, your message, offer, or recommendation will confuse or annoy your customers (like a discount coupon for a product someone purchased yesterday at full price).

With one accurate view of each customer updated in real time, you can confidently use the data you have about them to tailor your marketing efforts to each individual. It prevents marketers from working with outdated data or different departments working with their own incomplete view of each customer.

By providing the right message at the right time at every stage in the customer journey, you make customers feel like you know and understand them, which leads to higher loyalty and increased lifetime value (LTV).

Source: 2021 State of Personalization report

Access customer data instantly across the organization

With a unified customer view, everyone in your company knows where to look for and store customer data. This capability eliminates wasted time chasing down and verifying information, making the data more useful for the entire organization.

When, for example, someone in a meeting needs information on a customer to make a point or a decision, they can do so quickly and trust the data they're looking at is correct and up to date.

Understand customers through finer segmentation and analytics

A single view of the customer ensures customers get classified correctly and allows more specific classification over time. Your team knows, for example, "John desktop" is the same person as "John mobile" and can synthesize this data, something that's not possible without a unified customer view.

Imagine segmentation as putting labels on customers—and sometimes removing them—as you get to know them. This process might start with a label for "prospect" when they visit your website for the first time, which gets replaced with one for "customer" once they make a purchase on mobile. Over time, these individuals might get labels for "high-value client," "abandoned a shopping cart," and "interested in sneakers."

Teams across your company use these labels to group people, so they can analyze their behavior, attribute marketing campaigns, and provide tailored communications, offers, services, and recommendations.

Provide first-class customer service

A single view of the customer gives support agents the information they need to quickly or even proactively address customer needs. They can see someone's actions and previous interactions in one place, up to date to the current minute.

Say that a customer reaches out to support through live chat on your website. The unified customer view shows they got stuck filling out a contact form and which products they looked at beforehand. Your agent can use this information to immediately provide a solution or special offer without any additional input from the customer.

Unifying your customer view across the organization is an endeavor that requires a plan and the involvement of many people to overcome four major obstacles.

Remember the parable from the intro? Each team within your organization represents one of the men touching only one part of the elephant. Your analytics team might have a piece of customer info stored in the product database, marketing in your social media management platform, sales in their CRM, and customer service in the support ticketing system.

Every team has its own silo of data and processes it in a unique way. Nobody can see the whole or even agree on who's data is correct. Exchanging information between departments is difficult, time-consuming, and sometimes impossible.

Inaccurate or inconsistent data

With customer information scattered across the organization, several issues arise as data can become:

Duplicated: Multiple records for the same customer exist in different departments.

Disconnected: Data from different parts of the organization can't be linked and synchronized or only with great effort.

Decayed: Information like email addresses, phone numbers, and job titles become outdated if they're not verified and updated often.

Distrusted: Not all sources are created equal. An email address that went through a double opt-in procedure is more reliable than one entered manually into a CRM by a salesperson. But how to tell the difference without a single, central synchronization process?

Compliance and privacy concerns

You need to ask yourself whether you're legally allowed to store, process, and use every piece of customer information your company collects. Since both the amount of data and privacy regulations are multiplying, this question becomes even harder to address. In fact, others, like consumers or regulators, now also have the right to ask you questions about your data collection practices.

How can an organization hope to begin answering such requests if their own departments don't know who's collecting what information or which piece of data is the most up to date?

Legacy technical infrastructure

Many companies still rely on equipment and tools that can't deliver a single customer view, even though they collect plenty of data across the organization. These companies' internal systems might not connect to each other, or information is stored in incompatible formats by different teams.

This situation often arises when companies rely on their CRM as the backbone of their customer information. CRMs can’t capture a complete set of data from many channels, keep it up-to-date in real time, and connect it to the tools where employees need it.

A CDP like Segment with identity resolution software can resolve this situation. It's built for this central role and can standardize and synthesize data from all corners of the organization. The CRM can still serve its purpose for sales and, sometimes, marketing teams by exchanging its information with the CDP.

You can build a single customer view using a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to capture customer data across all the platforms, touchpoints, and tools you use. The CDP can clean, standardize, and centralize all this information and make it available across teams (without the help of engineers or analysts).

Collect data from different tools and sources

You can collect the information you need to build a single customer view by connecting data sources to your CDP using Segment Connections . Segment supports hundreds of tools that you can set up with a few clicks. You can link other properties like your website or iOS app by copying and pasting ready-made scripts.

The type of data that makes up a single customer view is different for each organization. The information you collect depends on the channels and tools you use and the available infrastructure and expertise.

Here's a list of typical data companies might feed into a single customer view:

Personal details and contact information

Website and mobile app activity

Product usage data

Purchase history

Point of sales (PoS) and transactional data

Customer support interactions

Demographics

Customer preferences

Marketing campaign data

Resolve customer identities using a CDP

You need to combine all the data you collect into one customer profile through identity resolution that compares identifiers like email addresses, login data, and IP numbers. This process helps you reconcile anonymous or ambiguous data with known visitor information to get more complete customer profiles. A CDP like Segment can automatically do most of this work. You can insert it into your existing processes and systems quickly and without much disruption.

Segment also standardizes all the information you collect through automated tracking plans and a privacy portal , so you ensure high-quality data and compliance with privacy regulations. It then uses the Personas feature to present all this information to you in a single customer view.

Make the synthesized data available across the organization

Segment makes it easy for teams to connect Destinations, which are endpoints for the customer data coming out of your CDP. This feature enables anyone to link their favorite tools and platforms or try out new ones.

Destinations also sync back any new information or changes to Segment, ensuring you keep your centralized data—and hence your single view of the customer—up to date across the organization.

The State of Personalization 2023

Our annual look at how attitudes, preferences, and experiences with personalization have evolved over the past year.

Frequently asked questions

### what does the term single customer view mean.

A single customer view means having one central location for every individual you do business with that provides an overview of all the data you’ve collected on them.

### How do you build a single customer view?

You can create a single customer view with a Customer Data Platform (CDP) like Segment, which captures customer data across all your platforms, touchpoints, and tools. The CDP can then clean, standardize, and centralize all this information and make it available to all your teams. They can easily connect to the CDP and use this customer information without the help of engineers or analysts.

### Why is it important to implement a single customer view?

A unified customer view enables organizations to deliver truly personalized and effective marketing, plus first-class, proactive customer service. It also provides every team with accessible, fully up-to-date customer information, which facilitates better decision-making and reduces time spent searching for information. Legally, a single customer view has also become a must-have, as complying with privacy regulations is virtually impossible without one.

Recommended articles

Want to keep updated on segment launches, events, and updates.

We’ll share a copy of this guide and send you content and updates about Twilio Segment’s products as we continue to build the world’s leading CDP. We use your information according to our  privacy policy . You can update your preferences at any time.

Thank you for subscribing!

• For Beginners
• For Experts
• Email All you need to know about email: strategy, solutions, etc.
• SMS What makes brilliant text message campaigns.
• Viber Viber messages that help reach out to your customers.
• Web Push Wield the power of web push notifications.
• Mobile Push Why mobile pushes matter for your business.
• App Inbox How an App Inbox can increase your marketing campaigns
• Omnichannel Introduce omnichannel solutions to your marketing strategy.
• Segmentation How to segment your customers to grow revenue.
• Recommendations + AI AI-powered product recommendations and how to use them for ecommerce.
• Automation Best marketing automation practices to transform your campaigns.
• Analysis How to analyse and improve marketing metrics.
• Data Collection (CDP) Data sources and collection methods.
• Copywriting Content your subscribers actually want to read.
• Design Awesome email marketing designs and how to create them.
• Calculators With our calculators, you’ll save lots of time.
• Cases Brilliant marketing case studies to learn from.
• Ideas Marketing ideas to boost your sales.
• Strategies Proven marketing tactics that generate more revenue.
• How To Marketing campaigns and analytics easily explained.
• Comparison Best email marketing platforms: review & analysis.
• News Features, news stories and fresh updates on the marketing trends.
• Video Marketing life caught on camera.
• Interviews Digital marketing explained by the industry leaders.
• Conferences Email marketing events you simply can’t leave unnoticed.
• What's New Introduce new features to your marketing strategy.
• Glossary See the comprehensive list of basic marketing terms, collected to help you create and improve your marketing strategy.
• Webinars See, Explore, Apply
• Email Examples Inspire your email marketing campaigns with our huge collection of email designs from a variety of industries and occasions, with comments by our experts.

Yuliia Khmelevska

Tech and Marketing Writer

16 May 2023

Single Customer View (SCV): Definition & How to Build One

Understanding your customers has never been so easy. Instead of brainstorming, guessing, and testing different assumptions, you are welcome to leverage customer data analysis, gain insights into their behavior, preferences, and expectations, and use this information as a foundation for your business strategy development.

Creating the Single Customer View (SCV) is the first step along this way, and that's why in this article, we'll define an SCV meaning, explain why it's important, and provide a step-by-step guide on how to build one. Whether you're a marketer, data analyst, or business owner, this article will help you unlock the power of the Single Customer View.

What is a Single Customer View (SCV)?

So, what is a Single Customer View and what data does it contain? A Single Customer View or SCV is a structured and unified representation of the information you have about a specific customer. This data is usually collected from multiple sources and includes all interactions, transactions, and engagements a customer has with a business across all channels and touchpoints, as well as personal information, like birthdate, age, and contact data.

Here's a simple example of how an SCV might look like using Python:

15 December 2018

What Is a CDP (Customer Data Platform)?

Kateryna Milokhina

11 January 2023

Customer Data Analysis Done Right: Recommendations & Best Practices

Natalie Ustymenko

Single Customer View: What It Is & How to Use It

A single customer view ( SCV ) is a way of gathering customer data in one record. This can improve your customer relationship management strategy .

Customers nowadays interact with companies via a variety of devices and marketing channels. By analyzing customer interactions, you can better understand your customers’ needs. But first, you need to consolidate the different types of data — which can be a challenge. In fact, 87% of marketers consider data their company’s most underutilized asset.

One way to make the most of the data is with a single customer view (SCV), which groups customer data in one place. An SCV gives you a clear picture of the customer journey across touchpoints. This can help you streamline your marketing efforts and provide a seamless customer experience.

Read on to learn what a single customer view is, why it’s important, and how to create an SCV for your business.

• What is a single customer view?

Benefits of using a single customer view

Common single customer view issues, how to create a single customer view, single customer view use cases in marketing, what is a single customer view (scv).

A single customer view, also known as a unified customer view, is a way of collecting customer information from different data sources in a single record. This includes first-party data and offline data such as:

• Contact information (email, phone number, etc.)
• Demographics (age, gender, location, etc.)
• In-store visits and online purchase history
• Point-of-sale (POS) and transactional data
• Social media or marketing campaign statistics
• Customer support interactions

Often, this data is scattered across different departments and sources. Many companies need a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or customer data platform (CDP) to merge the data and create an SCV.

For example, Brevo makes it simple to access customer data. All the contact information you need can be found in a single customer profile, which also gives you a 360-degree timeline of previous interactions across channels.

Find out more: What is a CDP?

Example of a single customer view in Brevo’s CRM suite

Having a single view of your customer data can save you valuable time and money. Here are just a few ways SCV can benefit your company.

Better collaboration

SCV centralizes customer data in one record and makes it accessible across your organization. With a unified customer view, product, customer support, and marketing teams have access to the same information. This lowers the risk of duplicate data and boosts efficiency.

Seamless customer experiences across channels

With SCV, businesses get a 360-degree view of the customer journey. A single view lets them better understand customer needs at different touchpoints across channels. This helps them improve their omnichannel marketing strategy and provide a seamless user experience.

Better targeting and segmentation

SCV organizes customer information in one place, making it easier for marketers to create audience segments. That’s because SCV gives them precise data regarding their customers’ interests, purchase history, and more.

Companies can then use this information to better target their marketing campaigns. Better targeting often leads to higher customer engagement.

Further reading: The Best Customer Segmentation Examples for Digital Marketing

Improved marketing decisions

Having an SCV gives companies a complete, real-time understanding of their customers. The data is easy to access and put into the context of the customer journey. This helps companies make smarter marketing decisions. 

Related: What is a CRM Database? How They Work and How to Choose One

Although using a single customer view has clear benefits, it’s not always easy to put into practice. Here are a few common pitfalls when it comes to SCV.

Inconsistent data quality

One issue with SCV is incomplete or inaccurate data. If you don’t connect all of your data streams to your SCV, you won’t have a full view of the customer journey. That makes it harder to optimize your marketing strategy, from allocating your budget to targeting your campaigns.

Lack of information due to data silos

Siloed data is a common hurdle for creating an SCV. This often means the data comes from only one source and isn’t shared across teams. SCV solves this issue by unifying the different data points in one easy-to-use record.

Existing legacy systems

Legacy systems (outdated programs) can prevent companies from using the data at their disposal to create an SCV. This is because of factors like outdated processes and data silos, which slow down or prevent data integration.

Compliance with data privacy laws

Data privacy laws such as the GDPR and CCPA might make it harder to create an SCV. This is because customers need to first consent to sharing their data. But with the right data collection processes, you can build an SCV while staying compliant with privacy regulations.

Here are the three main steps for creating a single customer view:

• Identify and merge data. First, decide which data sources to feed into the SCV. This might include demographics, purchase history, customer behavior, and more.
• Determine customer profiles. Customer identity resolution aligns identifiers such as email and IP addresses with other data sets to create a single profile for each customer. Brevo makes this easy by storing contact data and interaction history in a single record.
• Share access and establish use cases. Give the right teams across your company access to the customer records. Decide when to use the SCV and how.

Related: The 8 Best CRM Software for Small Business

SCV can be a game changer for your marketing strategy. Here are a few examples of common SCV use cases:

• Personalized content and marketing campaigns
• Social media ad optimization
• Cross-selling and upselling
• Identifying customers for loyalty programs
• Abandoned cart email reminders
• Lifecycle marketing, from awareness to retention
• Enhancing customer support and sales processes

Get started with single customer view

Having a single customer view is key to understanding your customers and providing an unforgettable user experience. SCV also helps you work more efficiently and save valuable resources.

With Brevo’s approachable CRM suite, it’s effortless to get started with SCV. All customer data can be found on the contact profile page, including a comprehensive interaction timeline that you can share across your company.

Ready to get started? Try Brevo’s sales solutions today.

About the author

• Email Marketing
• Chat & Messaging
• Omnichannel
• Software Guides
• Inside Brevo
• Transactional

Featured articles

11 Best Mailchimp Alternatives Compared (2024): Make the Switch

19 Best Cheap Email Marketing Services (July 2024)

How to Send Mass Email in Gmail: A Step-by-Step Guide

A Quick & Easy Guide to Sending Mass Email in Outlook

11 Best Email Marketing Platforms for Small Business (2024)

Get Free Email Templates: HTML, Responsive and Customizable

Ready to grow with Brevo?

Get the tools you need to reach your customers and grow your business.

September 5, 2023

Understanding Single Customer View in 2023: The Essential Guide for Modern Customer Engagement

In our age of digital interactions, businesses have access to an overwhelming amount of data concerning their customers. This data emerges from various sources such as website interactions, social media engagements, email communications, and direct purchases.

The compelling challenge is: How can a company harness all this fragmented data to truly understand its customers? The answer lies in the concept of the Single Customer View (SCV).

What is Single Customer View?

Single Customer View (SCV) is a unified record of a customer's interactions across multiple channels. It merges purchase records, website activities, email interactions, and more into one single view. With SCV, data isn’t just collected—it's refined, making it easier for businesses to make decisions which strengthen their bond with customers.

Elements of a Comprehensive Single Customer View

To understand the depth of the SCV, it's essential to examine what it encompasses:

• Personal Info: This includes the customer's primary details—name, address, email, and phone. Such basic data is essential for businesses wanting to establish clear communication channels and design customer-centric experiences.
• Demographics: Incorporating details like age, gender, location, and income level, demographic information provides businesses with a snapshot of a customer's profile and interests. This supports refined marketing strategies and a better understanding of target audiences.
• Purchase History: This includes each transaction made by the customer—itemising what was bought, the purchase date, and the price point. By analysing this, businesses can identify consumer patterns, anticipate needs, and tailor future product or service offerings.
• Online Behaviour: This sheds light on a customer's digital activities, ranging from overall site interactions to specific actions, like viewing products or adding them to a wish list. Such insights equip businesses to refine their digital platforms, to offer a more intuitive and engaging user experience.
• Brand Interactions: Cataloguing every interaction between the customer and the brand—from customer service inquiries to feedback on promotional campaigns—this data is instrumental for businesses to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty, and also to discover areas for potential enhancement.

SCV’s Role in Today’s Business World

SCV is more than just a tool; it's changing the way businesses connect with their customers. The key benefits of having a single view of each customer include:

• Personalised Customer Experiences By tracking every interaction a customer has with a brand, businesses can accurately tailor their offerings. This approach strengthens brand loyalty and converts occasional buyers into regular customers.
• Efficient Marketing Campaigns Using the insights from SCV, businesses can design marketing campaigns that truly resonate with their audience. This focused approach increases marketing effectiveness by avoiding tactics that don't deliver a good return.
• Enhanced Customer Service Understanding a customer's history allows support teams to address issues quickly and more effectively. This responsive service leads to increased customer satisfaction and reduces turnover.
• Informed Decision-Making SCV provides businesses with clear insights into market trends, highlighting top-performing products and successful marketing strategies. With this knowledge, businesses can pursue new opportunities and meet customer needs more effectively.
• Data Accuracy SCV helps in organising and cleaning up data, ensuring businesses have reliable information for decision-making.

Crafting an Effective Single Customer View

Harnessing the full potential of customer data is absolutely crucial for any business aiming to stay ahead. Here's a step-by-step guide to building a robust Single Customer View:

Step 1. Gather All Customer Data

• Source Tracking: Identify every system that is capturing customer information, including CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, and website analytics.
• Data Retrieval: Pull customer details from these platforms, focusing on demographics, purchase records, interactions, and preferences.

Step 2. Clean and Merge Data

• Data Consolidation: Combine the gathered data into one system, ensuring compatibility.
• Data Refinement: Rectify mistakes, eliminate duplicates, and complete any incomplete records to ensure data quality.

Step 3. Analyse the Data

• Pattern Detection: Utilise tools to learn recurring behaviours, preferences, and trends among customers.
• Segmentation: Categorise customers based on the identified patterns to enhance targeting and engagement.

Step 4. Make Informed Decisions

• Strategy Development: Create marketing campaigns or product enhancements tailored to specific customer groups based on the analysis.
• Feedback Loop: Regularly assess the outcomes of these initiatives, making adjustments as necessary to maintain an ongoing cycle of improvement.

Examples of SCV in action

SCV's utility isn't industry-specific; its advantages are universally applicable:

Utilising SCV, game developers can capture a player's in-game behaviour, preferences, and purchase history. This enables them to offer personalised content, game recommendations, and promotions that align with the player's interests and gameplay style.

By understanding individual behaviours, online platforms can offer precise product suggestions, timely deals, and promotions tailored to users' preferences.

SCV: The Cornerstone of Modern Customer Engagement

In today's dynamic environment, where consumer expectations can be changeable, SCV stands as a stable guide. While its implementation may be somewhat complex, the resulting depth of understanding and enhanced relationship-building capacity is invaluable for businesses.

To gain further insights into how SCV can elevate your customer engagement and drive business progress, reach out to our expert consultants at Engagement Lab today!

2024 Insights into the Asian OTT Streaming Media Market: Opportunities and Future Trends

Consumer Buying Intentions and Brand Loyalty in the Taiwanese Hot Pot Market

Unlock Growth Potential in China's Loyalty Program Market

Single customer view (SCV): what is it and how does it work?

Written by Małgorzata Poddębniak , Karolina Lubowicka

Published December 13, 2022 · Updated April 10, 2024

• In modern marketing, data is essential but often scattered across channels.
• Single customer view (SCV)  is a method for consolidating data about prospects and clients into a unified record, providing a comprehensive overview of user interactions across various channels and touchpoints.
• An SCV can include information about user behavior, demographics, interactions with sales and customer support, buying history, consent preferences, and more.
• Building an SCV involves strategic planning, data integration, and tools like customer data platforms (CDPs).
• Integrating your customer data into an SCV helps you provide better access to information across the company, segment customers more precisely, and make more informed decisions about your business.
• Challenges such as poor data quality and unstandardized data exist, but you can overcome them with the right strategy and data stack.

If modern marketing was a car, data would be its fuel. Data helps marketers form and adjust their strategy, drive their decisions and evaluate the effectiveness of their campaigns. 

With consumers constantly generating vast amounts of data, marketers have a lot of information they can use to grasp their needs and interests. 

The issue is that customers use different channels to interact with companies. They move between devices and touchpoints, completing various tasks and falling under different departments – marketing, customer service, product teams, and more.

All the data that customers generate can be difficult to make sense of when it’s scattered across platforms, with limited options for analysis by different teams.

The solution? 

Creating a single customer view (SCV) that aggregates user information from various sources, encompassing actions they took and touchpoints they arrived at. 

From today’s article, you will learn what single customer views are and how you can build them, as well as how you can use them to personalize user experience and make informed marketing decisions.

What is a single customer view (SCV)?

A single customer view (also called a 360 , 360-degree, or unified customer view ) is a method for gathering all the data about each of your prospects and clients, then merging it into a single record.

Typically, you can create a single customer view as a profile page in a customer data platform (CDP). The CDP can be used to standardize and centralize all user information and make it available across teams without the involvement of devs or analysts.

By consolidating all information about your users in one centralized location, you get a powerful overview of every action they’ve performed on your website (using desktop or mobile devices), in your mobile app, and even in your offline store.

Above all, a unified customer view helps you forge better customer relationships by providing consistent interactions across touchpoints and departments.

We are working on a CDP that will work in synergy with your analytics stack by letting you easily import and export data from numerous sources and create detailed audiences and customer profiles.

Crucially, the CDP will allow you to access and maintain comprehensive SCVs on your clients. 

Read more on how our upcoming CDP can give you a better understanding of who your users are and their interactions with your brand.

Types of data collected in a single customer view

An SCV is created by merging various pieces of information about your users from many sources, often scattered throughout the tools used by different departments – not just marketing but also sales, product design, and more.

The information you collect depends on the channels and tools you use and the available infrastructure and expertise.

Data used to create a single customer view may include the following:

• Website & mobile app activity and behavioral data – This could include clicks, scrolls, hovers, pages visited, time spent on page, form submissions and other interactions with your website, mobile app or server gathered by an analytics tool. Other examples are information on the categories, products and blog posts browsed by the user, products added to basket or abandoned, etc.
• CRM and offline data – This will often include personal details and contact information like postal address, phone number, email address, social network accounts, etc.
• Demographics – Such as age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education, and employment.
• Transactional systems and purchase history – For example, data about the number of products purchased (both online and offline), order/subscription value, order/renewal dates, product abandonment, returns, cancellations, etc.
• Customer support interactions – A customer’s contact with your support team, be it via support tickets, emails, phone calls, etc.
• Sales team interactions – Details on pre-sales follow-ups and contact your sales reps make with prospects and customers.
• Consent preferences – Records of consent for data processing provided by your users. Under regulations such as GDPR , users can give consent to selected data collection purposes and reject the ones they don’t agree to, be it personalization, remarketing, or A/B testing.
• Marketing tools – Users’ interactions with your social platforms, SEO tools, ad platforms, email marketing communication, marketing automation platforms, and others.

As you might have noticed, an SCV is composed of first-party data – the information that a brand or company collects directly from its customers. 

First-party data gives you control over the data and provides transparency on how it was acquired. It’s also far more accurate and relevant for the specificity of a given company and its operations, and in this realm, takes precedence over second- and third-party data.  This makes SCVs an even more powerful and valuable tool for getting in-depth insights into each of your customers. 

If you want to dig deeper into the benefits of first-party data, read our blog post on Why First-Party Data is the Most Valuable to Marketers .

How you can use a single customer view in digital marketing

Data contained in unified profiles can be used in many ways depending on your organizational needs and the marketing channels you’re using. 

The data you have access to can answer many important questions, such as:

• What are your users’ preferences and interests?
• What products or services have they purchased, shown interest in or abandoned?
• Which stage of the buyer’s journey are your users at?
• How have users interacted with your company and what touchpoints have they gone through?

A 360-customer view offers marketers a wide range of possibilities and insights, but at the heart of the SCV is personalization. Thanks to data gathered from people’s browsing behavior and merged with user profile information, you’ll be able to display products or content that truly resonate with visitors.

In particular, you will be able to benefit from unified customer profiles in:

• Cross-sell and upsell campaigns 
• Facebook and Google Ads campaigns
• Email and social media campaigns
• Loyalty programs (promotions, discounts)
• Service or product advice
• Customer support and sales communication
• Customized product recommendations
• Cart abandonment reminders
• Personalized onboarding

And the list could go on. It’s just a matter of your creativity and available resources.

What are the benefits of applying a single customer view?

By now, we’ve gone through what an SCV is and which types of data it consists of, but how exactly can it help your business? 

Here’s a summary of the most important benefits of incorporating an SCV into your marketing strategy:

Ability to store customer data in one place and make it easily accessible for different departments

Creating a 360-degree user view lets you store all user information in one location, allowing you to see all their characteristics at one glance. 

A unified customer view solves the problem of siloed or duplicate data – a side effect of organizations adding new channels and software that hold information separately without proper integration.

A data silo is a collection of data controlled by one department or team and isolated from the rest of the organization. 

If data is isolated and only accessible to one department, it’s difficult to share user information between teams and use it to improve the customer experience. And it also leads to a lot of duplicate data in the system. 

With a unified customer view, everyone in your company knows where to find and store customer data. When, for example, someone in a meeting needs information on a customer to make a point or a decision, they can do so quickly and trust that the data they’re looking at is correct and up to date.

It also unifies disparate data sources and identities, and combines them into a comprehensive customer overview that a wide range of departments can utilize in their work and the tools they use.

For instance, a user can submit a few contact forms with different phone numbers but the same email address – you can connect all the received forms and establish that they belong to the same person.

This is how SCVs can help you avoid the inefficiencies that come with diffuse data sources. Every department at your organization will have access to the same scope of accurate information about users and be able to use it for their respective purposes.

How to connect data dots with marketing technology

Most marketers work with numerous marketing systems which, when combined, form so-called “marketing stacks”. Integrating them to achieve a unified customer view is challenging and involves a deep understanding of the nature of these connections.

Experts from the Customer Data Platform Institute discuss different ways to bring them together:

• Not integrating any system. That’s the method that 29% of companies apply, since it’s probably the easiest approach. The problem is that this way won’t provide you with an SCV at all.

Access to multi-channel and multi-device marketing data

Given the vast volumes of data you can access today, gathering and adequately connecting data points from different channels becomes difficult.

According to The Aberdeen Group :

“Companies with extremely strong cross-channel customer engagement retain on average 89% of their customers, compared to 33% for companies with weak cross-channel customer engagement”.

When analyzing your marketing data, you need to answer the following questions:

• What is the effect of your marketing activities on conversion rates?
• Which devices most often lead to conversions?
• Which channels contribute to the most conversions?
• How should you allocate your marketing and advertising budget to make it efficient and maximize your conversion rate?
• How can you decrease the acquisition cost per marketing channel?

Finding answers to these questions might take time and effort.

Users can jump from smartphone to desktop to tablet and back again as they visit your website, or use different browsers for their visits, which can make marketing attribution a real headache. 

Also, one user can move through touchpoints on different online channels – for example, click on your Google Ad, visit your site directly and then navigate to it from organic search.   

This is where single customer views come in handy. With SCVs, you can take advantage of models that help you assign the right amount of credits to each channel – like multi-device and multi-channel attribution . You’ll be able to stop using old and ineffective conversion attribution models relying on the last or first clicks.

SCVs can help you recreate a user’s whole journey with your brand and all their touchpoints, regardless of how many devices or channels people have used to contact you. With this information, you will be able to better plan and adjust your marketing strategy and accurately evaluate its results.

Understanding customers through finer segmentation and analytics

Detailed information about your app or website visitors equals more information available when crafting audience segments. Unlike aggregated data that misleadingly implies that all visitors are equal, segmented data reflects how different they really are. People use various devices and browsers, have many demographic characteristics, and face different issues using your site or app.

Precise data can let you segment your users based on relevant attributes and behaviors, which provides better insights. 

With access to an SCV, you can segment users based on their:

• Buyers’ lifecycle stages
• Specific locations
• Profession or role at their company
• Purchase history
• Visiting patterns
• Content viewed
• Contact preferences
• Conversion data
• User type or persona
• Time and date of activity

With strategically crafted segments, you can tailor your marketing messages more accurately to your visitors’ needs. You can then increase user satisfaction with your brand, lower marketing costs and have more opportunities for creating value, driving sales and building loyalty.

Being able to make more informed, data-driven marketing decisions

With a more holistic overview of your consumers’ behavior, you’ll stop making marketing decisions based on pure assumptions. Forget about hit-and-miss marketing campaigns.

Single customer views can improve campaign performance by letting you see which of your marketing efforts are most effective and what type of communication gets the best response, as well as identify your most valuable customers.

You have an opportunity to analyze each user’s behavior in a more granular way and plan your next move based on that. Through that, you can better adjust cross-sell and upsell recommendations, increase customer retention and optimize ad spend. 

Your team will be able to reach customers at relevant points in the buying process rather than dragging out marketing campaigns due to a poor understanding of each segment’s customer journey. 

All this data can inform aspects of your marketing strategy – who your personas are, what activities you choose to target them with and what unique value your brand proposes that speaks to your customers.

Providing better personalization and targeting

With full-view user data, you can use a single customer view to improve your personalization efforts. 

As a report by McKinsey shows, 71% of customers expect personalized communications and products or services tailored to their needs from the companies they purchase from.

And the results of meeting customers’ needs are tangible, as 80% of companies report seeing an uplift after implementing personalization in their strategy.

When working with inaccurate or incomplete data, it’s easier to make mistakes. For example, you might send multiple copies of the same content to one user, or waste your marketing budget on advertising a product to users who have already bought it.

Full-dimensional customer profiles with visitors’ habits, demographics, clicking behavior, purchasing history and lifestyle preferences give you a deeper understanding of their needs, habits, and intentions than if you were only analyzing one type of data. 

You can combine data previously accessible only to specific departments to create more sophisticated segments for granular targeting. Then, you’ll be able to develop better-tailored communications and offerings across the digital landscape. 

With your buyers’ location and purchase history, you can send customized messages with information about events happening in the area or hosted by the store where they tend to shop.

By viewing your customers’ interactions with your emails or social media profiles, you can target valuable buyers who have been less active in your marketing channels with a special campaign or promotion.

If you provide the right message at the right time at every stage in the customer journey, customers will be more likely to purchase your products or sign up for the services you offer. This can lead to higher loyalty and increased lifetime value (LTV).

Delivering individual user experiences will set you apart from the competition, drive growth, and improve your brand’s positioning as a leader in your industry.

Cultivating customer lifecycle marketing

You can influence your customer lifecycle marketing with detailed knowledge of your users’ behavior throughout the entire user journey. Customer lifecycle marketing (CLM) consists of strategies an organization can apply to impact customer behavior throughout every stage of the marketing cycle, from reaching the user, through acquisition, conversion and retention until they get to brand loyalty.

A customer lifecycle marketing strategy will depend on the complexity of your customer journey and the number of touchpoints and channels at each stage. 

To positively impact customers in their journey, you can use different sources of information about them – such as demographic, transactional and behavioral data, all of which can be stored in a single customer view. The data can be used to develop tailored campaigns based on the stages of their journey and detailed customer segment information. 

Customer lifecycle marketing also heavily relies on personalization. Under a CLM strategy, you can divide your clients into the following groups:

• Prospects – showed some interest but have not purchased
• Active customers – customers who have purchased
• Inactive customers – customers who have purchased but not recently and are at risk of churn
• Lapsed customers – customers who have purchased but not for a long time

Your goal is to transform all the prospects, inactive and lapsed customers, into active buyers of your products and services.

Fortunately, with the data provided by SCV, you can easily detect individuals that fall into those three categories. Then you can prepare marketing campaigns that will help you win back their interest and loyalty.

Single customer view – use case example

Imagine you want to identify your lapsed customers who used to be active buyers of your products or services. 

The first thing you do is to use the data coming from unified views of users. You identify the right user group by creating segments based on:

• Time since last order
• Previous purchase frequency
• Purchase value

That way, you can spot users who used to purchase from you frequently and spent significant amounts. But, for some reason, they’ve stopped doing so. 

With that knowledge in your hands, you can serve them a dedicated email campaign with an attractive promotional code to shift their attention to your brand again.

Easier to stay privacy-compliant

In modern marketing, you must ensure your company collects and stores customer data in a privacy-compliant way to adhere to privacy laws like the GDPR or CCPA, which tend to be quite strict. 

The GDPR requires companies that fall under it to:

• Correct inaccurate records they may have shared with third parties
• Respect consumer rights to access the information they hold about the customers
• Have a legal basis for processing personal data
• Acquire valid consent to collect, retain and use personal data
• Have procedures in place for detecting, reporting and investigating a personal data breach

Information on all the above aspects needs to be recorded and stored, so it can be easily accessed when necessary – for example, to prove compliance in the case of an audit.

That’s where a unified customer view becomes valuable again. Having an SCV that contains cleansed, legal and accurate information is a significant step towards being complicit and mitigating some of the risks of breaching these regulations.

CSVs will also help you resolve consent decisions and preferences at an individual level. This way, you will get a clear picture of the purposes for which you can process each user’s data. 

Consider pairing your analytics stack with a consent management system to simplify and streamline the process of collecting users’ consent.

In case you want to know how the technology can work in line with GDPR, check out our post: Customer data platforms: The best choice in the post-GDPR landscape

How to create a 360-degree customer view

As we’ve mentioned above, creating a unified customer view is a complex process that involves merging data dispersed across digital sources and getting rid of so-called data silos.

From a practical point of view, you need to focus on the following aspects:

Before you start on the path to creating a single customer view, it is essential to take a journey-based view of customer interactions. By thinking about end-to-end customer journeys that span multiple channels rather than isolated touchpoints, you can start to put together the pieces required to solve the single customer view puzzle.

You need to consider their present and past moves, going back and forth, as it’s a non-linear path. Then you can easily predict a few steps ahead.

What’s more, you follow users across all channels, watch as they switch between them, and stay alert to their pain points to help people when they get stuck. To connect and analyze all these data bits, you can turn to customer journey analytics.

If you’re curious about the details of building 360-degree customer view profiles and journey analytics, have a look at:

• How Analytics & Customer Data Platform Can Help You Track the Full Customer Journey
• How Customer Journey Analytics Will Change the Way You Look at Customer Experience Optimization

#1 Have a sound strategy in place

It takes a lot of effort and planning to create a 360-degree customer view . With a thorough strategy, you can define the scope and purpose of your SCV project. First, you need to know what you want to achieve with it and how it will help your organization.

It also involves engaging different company departments, getting ready to introduce business-wide changes, and managing different resources, such as the budget, assets and external suppliers.

Then you need to identify and prioritize data sources that you will use to feed into the single customer views and choose the right technological solutions to help you collect, merge and analyze data and put it to further use.

#2 Merge user data from different sources

With all data sources in place, whether it’s your CRM, email platform, marketing automation platform, or transactional system, and after you determine the types of data you will feed into your SCVs, you need to merge the data bits into single records.

The most efficient way would be to employ a CDP that lets you consolidate every data point about your users and provides you with a complete overview of their actions.

#3 Resolve customer identities

Identity resolution is the process of creating an addressable customer profile by analyzing and resolving data across multiple touchpoints, attributes and systems. It is typically done by a software system like a CDP and entails comparing and matching identifiers like email addresses, login data, device ID, cookie ID, phone numbers, etc. 

The stitching process uses algorithms and statistical analysis to create a persistent customer identifier that can be used across systems and campaigns. This customer identifier is then used to further enrich a customer profile as more data becomes available.

Identity resolution is a deterministic matching method ensuring 80-90% accuracy, which lets you identify and match users across extensive data sets.

Customer identity matching helps you reconcile anonymous or ambiguous data. You get to bring together the separate pieces of data collected on an individual customer by recognizing that they refer to the same visitor. 

With such a degree of accuracy of profile matching, you can build a rich and expandable database of people profiles that you can further enrich along the whole user journey users take with your brand.

What to do after creating an SCV

First, you need to ensure every relevant team in your organization has access to the assembled single customer views. Different departments can analyze the SCVs on multiple levels to determine industry trends, marketing successes and failures, customer engagement, how they should readjust their efforts, and what requires more focus. All these acquired insights can be shared among teams.

Then, it’s time to act. Insights from the analysis of organized and unified customer data can be used to hone your marketing and sales efforts and develop loyal customers. Clean and updated single customer views can help exclude existing customers from the costly top-of-the-funnel initiatives that would be irrelevant to them. Insights about customer engagement can guide future marketing plans and product development.

Issues with building a single customer view

According to new research from Experian , 81% of marketers say they have trouble achieving a 360-degree user view .

Some barriers are easier to cross, especially when management realizes that the results are worth the effort. That’s the case with money or corporate politics. Others might take more time and effort.

Poor data quality

The quality of data for your marketing initiatives is critical. To create an SCV, everyone –  from marketers to customer experience specialists – must ensure that your organization has reliable and accurate information on clients.

Part of this process involves keeping your data up to date, as it might become outdated. That’s why monitoring your database regularly and, most importantly, validating your data sources is crucial.

Disconnected data

Meanwhile, over half of the marketers from enterprise brands state that the main obstacle to creating a cross-channel marketing strategy is linking data to develop an SCV. This results from the lack of proper technology to facilitate the process.

Fortunately, you can employ a CDP to create and maintain complete customer records. These platforms help you aggregate user details from multiple sources, create detailed segments, and effectively apply data in your content personalization, remarketing campaigns and other marketing endeavors. 

There are different options available on the market – check out our comparison of the most popular Customer Data Platforms .

Legacy systems

Despite having a wealth of data at their fingertips, many organizations need help using it because they still rely on legacy systems. That’s the biggest obstacle to data integration, alongside insufficient data quality and standardization.

And when it comes to building an SCV, data integration is of paramount importance. Marketers must face the challenge of data scattered across channels and stuck in outdated systems.

Also, there’s a good chance your historical data doesn’t fit in the new system format or isn’t accessible in new systems, and may be stored only in a data warehouse.

Moreover, legacy systems can contain terminology or procedures that are not relevant anymore and can hamper the understanding of current methods.

As you can see, a 360-degree customer view is a very effective way to manage user information. And if you’re interested in creating unified customer profiles at your organization, there is no better tool than our upcoming CDP.

With a CDP, you get to collect all siloed data into one customer record, segment users based on certain conditions, deliver personalized customer experiences across different channels, and enrich your records in other tools.

Related posts :

• Audience targeting: how to successfully use a CDP
• What is customer journey analytics and why it’s important for your business
• 4 key differences between data management platforms and customer data platforms [UPDATED]

But we know that the topic of single customer views and CDPs can give rise to many questions. 

Our experts will be happy to share their knowledge about using SCVs to boost sales and consumer loyalty. 

They will also answer any questions about the CDP we’re developing and explain how you can use it to integrate and activate customer data.

Małgorzata Poddębniak

Senior Content Marketer

Senior content marketer at Piwik PRO, copywriter, translator and editor. She started as a freelancer, gaining experience with creating versatile marketing content for various channels and industries. Later, she began working as a translator and editor, specializing in academic articles and essays, mainly in the field of history and politics. After becoming interested in SEO, she moved on to work as a content writer for a technical SEO agency. While there, she designed the company newsletter and planned and created in-depth articles, practical guides, interviews, and other supporting marketing materials. She joined Piwik PRO with extensive knowledge of technology, SEO, and digital marketing. At Piwik PRO, she writes about analytics, privacy, marketing, personalization, and data management and explains product best practices and industry trends for different industries.

Karolina Lubowicka

Senior Content Marketer and Social Media Specialist

An experienced copywriter who takes complex topics of data privacy & GDPR and makes them understandable for all. LinkedIn Profile

How to migrate to a new analytics platform: The ultimate guide

November 24, 2022 by Aleksandra Szczepańska

We’re reinventing our Customer Data Platform

December 14, 2022 by Karolina Lubowicka

Core – a new plan for Piwik PRO Analytics Suite

Privacy-compliant analytics, built-in consent management and EU hosting. For free.

• Customer Data Platform (16)
• Interviews (24)
• Analytics (172)
• Consent Manager (7)
• Banking & finance (13)
• Comparisons (12)
• Conversion optimization (24)
• Data management (54)
• Data privacy & security (118)
• Government (8)
• Healthcare (14)
• News & releases (40)
• Personalization (22)
• Product best practices (26)
• Tag Manager (10)
• Use cases (32)

Similar posts

• Analytics implementation: A 12-step guide (Tracking plan included)
• Data processing agreement: 7 elements every GDPR-compliant DPA should have
• What is PII, non-PII, and personal data? [UPDATED]
• Device fingerprint tracking in the post-GDPR Era

• Book a meeting

Popular topics

• People-Based Marketing
• Meet-a-LiveIntenter
• Email Revenue
• Identity Graph
• Subscriber Acquisition
• First-Party Data
• Direct-to-Consumer
• Cookie Apocalypse

Single customer view: What is it and why does it matter?

• Identity Resolution

Victoria de Leon

What is a single customer view.

A single customer view, also known as a 360-degree view of the customer or a unified customer view, is a comprehensive collection of data gathered from various channels that’s connected to one individual. It provides a cohesive overview of customer behaviors, so you can better understand what your audiences need and how to engage them with personalized experiences.

A single customer view includes, but is not limited to, first-party data collected from the following sources:

• Mobile apps
• Email subscriptions
• Brick and mortar stores
• Social networks
• Customer support teams

Why does it matter?

Google ran a study to see how many channels a woman used to buy a pair of jeans. The result? She conducted research for 73 days and interacted with more than 250 touch points — including blogs, YouTube videos, and retailer sites — before finally making a purchase. Still, this isn’t a unique experience. According to Google, buyers can spread their path to purchase across 500 touch points or more.

Without it, the people who engage with these touch points and the resulting data points exist as separate identities and disconnected data points across several platforms, apps, and databases. Without a unified customer view, businesses cannot efficiently and effectively market their products and services to their existing and prospective customers.

However, with a unified customer view, businesses can reconcile all these data points into one unified identity — creating a complete picture and understanding of their individual consumers or a single customer view. Let’s explore this further.

What are the benefits of a single customer view?

A unified customer view can be the foundation of a solid and efficient marketing strategy. With a single customer view to guide them, businesses can:

• Personalize marketing campaigns across channels and platforms: Reach your audience on their preferred channels with their consent, like email or SMS, and meet them on their favorite platforms with messaging that speaks to their interests and needs.
• Break down silos between teams. Departments across an organization can easily access the same customer data from one place to inform strategies.
• Reduce duplicate and low-quality data. By storing data in one centralized platform, it’s easier for businesses to organize, clean, and keep data up to date.
• Create unique audience segments. Build and target specific groups of customers based on demographics, behaviors, content preferences, and stages of the buyer journey.
• Improve customer service. With a clear view of each customer’s interactions and habits, support reps can better deliver value at each touchpoint and anticipate people’s needs.
• Improve measurement and attribution. It enables businesses to more accurately measure the impact of their marketing and advertising efforts on their revenue.
• Optimize advertising spend. With improved measurement and attribution, businesses can optimize their advertising spend or even redistribute their budgets to channels, formats, or approaches that move the needle on their business.

How does identity resolution help?

Identity resolution is the process of matching specific identifiers — like email addresses, device IDs, and usernames — to individual customers. It is what makes a single customer view possible.

Identity resolution is complicated now that customers are using more devices than ever . Furthermore, Google is phasing out third-party cookies which businesses long for relied on identity and retargeting. That’s why identity resolution is critical to creating a single customer view. With identity resolution, you gain the necessary data to build a comprehensive understanding of each customer, attributing information from different platforms to individual people.

How can you create a single customer view?

Creating a single customer view isn’t so hard if you have the right tools and strategies at your disposal.

To get started, you can:

• Collect customer data across platforms. You can use a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to gather and sync data from each customer touchpoint.
• Integrate data from legacy systems. Don’t forget to include data from channels that aren’t connected to your CDP. This might include your call center or an outdated marketing cloud, for instance.
• Build an identity graph. An identity graph combines anonymous and known customer data for identity resolution. LiveIntent’s proprietary identity graph, for instance, pulls from millions of unique data points to turn anonymous website traffic into authenticated customer data.

Your business needs a unified customer view

Even if your business doesn’t sell jeans, chances are your customers use a range of channels, devices, and touch points along their path to purchase. So if you want to engage them, you need a way to gather and manage all that data in one place. Only with a single customer view can you truly understand how your customers behave and how teams across your organization can reach them with high-quality, personalized experiences.

If you’d like to know more about building a single customer view, how it can help with segmentation and its relationship to identity resolution, check out our identity resolution content .

Learn more about Identity Resolution

Boost your revenue post third-party cookies in three easy steps

Introducing HIRO, an addressability solution to help brands and publishers thrive in the post third-party cookie era

Meet your best customer (again) with the power of Dormant Email Reactivation

Case Study: Single customer view: keeping it clean

Many would agree that keeping existing customers happy and loyal is one of the toughest challenges businesses face during the recession. Holding accurate data will do a lot to help this and allows businesses to communicate relevant information that will maintain interest. However, failure to keep up-to-date records will only result in time wasted on poorly targeted outreach.

Just collating everything you know about a customer is not enough. Customers will only listen if the information they receive is timely and relevant to their preferences. A true single customer view will help make this happen, but can only be achieved when a documented data quality strategy is in place that has suppressed outdated information and removes duplicate records. Whether data has been captured online, face to face or over the phone in call centres, you will need to identify where incorrect or duplicate information exists, and clean your data records accordingly. A single spring clean is not an option, as databases that are left to decay will be subject to contacts that have changed address, passed away or registered with the mailing preference service.

Building a single customer view will not only have great benefits in terms of saving the customer from duplicate mailings, but will also help marketers improve ROI on their marketing campaigns by using accurate insight on where resource should be allocated. A single customer view will also boost a brand’s green credentials, safe in the knowledge that the communication it dispatches will be far more likely to reach a willing recipient rather than be put in the bin before being read.

Experian QAS offers a number of products and services to make sure organisations’ contact data is correct and helps maintains a single customer view. We’re helping our customers suppress unwanted records from their marketing databases and prevent the entry of duplicate records into their database, saving them from having to remove these manually.

Adopting steps such as these will allow your organisation to hold a single customer view based on better managed data across the organisation, refining contact data into real up-sell and cross sell opportunities and keeping prospects’ records accurate.

Latest from Marketing Week

‘We’re competing against a takeaway’: Merlin Entertainments on capturing ‘maximum’ discretionary spend

The entertainment giant launched its first enterprise-wide brand campaign to promote its cross-category offers at a time when household budgets are “squeezed”.

Overcoming defensiveness and brands as assets: Your Marketing Week

At the end of every week, we look at the key stories, offering our view on what they mean for you and the industry. From changes to accounting meaning brands could be recorded as assets to marketers needing to remind themselves of the role they play, it’s been a busy week. Here is my take.

‘Sustainable hype’: One CMO’s playbook for sports sponsorships

Joining education platform Udemy as CMO a year ago with a goal to drive brand awareness, Genefa Murphy convinced the business to explore sports partnerships.

‘Colour is back – but it won’t be the last personalisation trend driven by AI’

Consumers are paying attention to colour again as part of a wider trend towards personalisation that will eventually encompass all stages of the customer journey.

Search anything and hit ‘Enter’

• Marketing News
• Mark Ritson
• Helen Edwards
• Peter Weinberg & Jon Lombardo
• Helen James
• Richard Shotton
• Newsletters
• Festival of Marketing
• Knowledge Bank
• AI: Beyond the Hype
• Careers & Salaries
• Marketing Effectiveness
• Marketing Leadership
• Brand Positioning
• Customer Experience
• Design & Branding
• Market Research
• Price Strategy
• Product & Service Innovation
• Targeting & Segmentation
• Advertising
• Agency Relationships
• Content Marketing
• CRM & Loyalty
• Data & Analytics
• Influencer Marketing
• Programmatic Advertising
• Social Media Marketing
• Sponsorship & Experiential
• Career Development
• Skills & Training
• John Lewis & Partners
• Marks & Spencer
• Procter & Gamble
• Partner with us

How a single customer view makes your team more effective

About a decade ago, titles like Social Media Manager started popping up. These roles fill the gap a growing digital culture had created. However, these new roles also create silos. In turn, these silos create various customer profiles used by different groups within the organization. A fragmented view of the customer leads to inefficiencies, but there is an answer- a single customer view.

Single Customer View

Silos don't just exist inside departments but plague most companies. The main problem with silos is there is no way to share the insights of various teams from across your organization. Not sharing insights becomes more of an issue when another department owns a piece of your workflow. For example, when data or engineering own a process like segment-building, you risk ending with overly broad and static audiences because what you truly wanted was lost in translation. To their credit, what ends up happening is your data scientist functions like a short-order cook of database queries, making segments to order instead of giving each persona the care it deserves. This result isn't good for anyone, especially the customer.The intuitive solution to these silos is housing all marketing activities in a centralized customer data platform (CDP) like Simon Data. Here's what a marketing hub should look like:

Shared Data Insights

As any marketer knows, having access to your data is the first step in understanding your customer. Now imagine having access to data insights while gaining the ability to control and play with this data on demand. Spending time playing with data leads to understanding. Understanding leads to insights that create things like better segmentation.With a centralized hub, every department gains access to the same segments; Additionally, the database updates in real-time. Meaning, the segments created by an email manager are instantly available for the social media manager to use. In the end, each department is now targeting the same customer but with their campaigns.The ability to organize teams around customer data gives a fantastic amount of flexibility. When the friction of collaborating lessens, things happen much quicker and more efficiently.

Clear Messaging

At Simon Data, we integrate your data to your end channels. We do that by housing- data, segmentation, automation, point solutions, and end channels in a single place. Through this integration, your entire company gains a window into everything happening with your brand. This access helps maintain consistent messaging and avoids redundancies. Gaining clarity into what other teams are doing strengthens customer experiences.  

Reporting and Analysis

Another area that benefits from a centralized marketing hub is your strategy. In many organizations, making a decision happens quickly. Therefore, the choice is often made without every department weighing in. As is, partial information ends up plaguing many marketing teams. A significant perk of having a central hub is not choosing between making a quick or informed decision. The centralized UI allows comparisons of past and present campaigns across any critical metric. One such example is cross-channel vs. longitudinal segment performance. This example shows how an acquisition-focused segment has performed over x-number of campaigns. Ultimately, this campaign discovers if acquisition efforts for this segment are improving.

Why It Matters

Say you see a performance issue for a particular segment. The only problem is you don't have access to your segmentation platform. In that case, someone from marketing has to ask someone in a tech role to look into the issue. This extra step adds time to an urgent matter. However, using the single customer view, the marketer who spotted the problem can inspect it instantly. What they might find is a change in performance from the east to the west coast. Once armed with this information, marketers can quickly set up new segments. These segments can address the same buckets of people with the added metric of location. While the above is a minor tweak, without this ability living in the marketing function, this task is roughly a four-week job. Throughout an organization, everyone's time is taxed. Projects you are doing get put on the back burner as new tasks arise. Having a single customer view living inside your CDP can save you time while finding new market opportunities.

Stay in the know !

Recommended resources

Gartner names MuleSoft a Leader

Unleash the power of Salesforce Customer 360 through integration

Anypoint Platform Fundamentals

The world of AI is a world of APIs

Deutschsprachig.

Diese Inhalte gibt es auch auf Deutsch. Um die Sprache zu ändern, klicken Sie auf das Symbol.

Deutsche Version

© Copyright 2024 Salesforce, Inc. All rights reserved .

AXA Luxembourg

Questions? Ask an expert .

AXA Luxembourg connects systems for a single customer view

3X faster project delivery time

25% reduction in manual work

3X faster claims processing

Held back by custom-coded integrations

AXA Luxembourg, along with AXA Wealth Europe, is part of the AXA Group — which encompasses over 171,000 employees that serve 105M customers in 61 countries.

To become the #1 preferred insurance company, AXA Luxembourg needed to embrace digital to move faster as a business, outshine the competition, and better serve their policyholders.

None of these goals were easy, as the company needed to better leverage their data — which required connecting different homemade systems on-premises and external systems in the cloud. With custom coded integrations, it was costly and slow to connect systems, apps, and data.

Improving the policyholder experience and increasing employee productivity

For AXA Luxembourg, moving faster as a business required:

• Reducing operational costs and eliminating manual labor by automating key business processes, such as claims management
• Creating a single customer view of policyholders to resolve their queries faster — improving the customer experience and employee productivity
• Building an architectural foundation that enables the team to launch future customer innovations more quickly through reuse

Moving from custom-code to reusable APIs and integrations

To start, AXA Luxembourg partnered with Cap4 Lab to identify an integration and API platform that would allow them to move beyond custom-coded integrations.

The AXA Luxembourg team turned to MuleSoft. “We chose Anypoint Platform due to its built-in security and the fact that Mule 4’s templates and examples enable us to develop more quickly,” said Jonathan Warnand, CRM, Integration & Release Manager, AXA Luxembourg.

“Mule 4 made our developers' lives easier — the improved error handling capabilities make troubleshooting issues a breeze," said Warnand.

AXA Luxembourg embedded integration and API best practices into their foundation by creating a Center of Enablement (C4E) — a cross-functional team charged with enabling teams to move beyond custom-coded integrations and adopt an API-led approach to integration.

Automating the claims management process

For their first project, the AXA team wanted to automate business processes by streamlining claims management. This required connecting an internal contract management system and claims management system to an external claims management system. Previously, team members manually entered information into each system — a cumbersome and error-prone process.

Armed with a C4E, MuleSoft Training resources, and Cap4 Lab’s hands-on peer programming model, the AXA Luxembourg team became Anypoint Platform experts in just 6 months.

"Getting started with a new technology platform is always a journey, but we never could have imagined it would be this easy with Anypoint Platform. We were concerned it may take a while for our .NET developers team to get up to speed, but MuleSoft's prebuilt APIs and connectors made it so easy.”

The team developed six APIs that connected data across multiple systems, including the Document Management API, Insurance Backend API, and Customer API. They built the API-led integrations in just 12 weeks, compared to the 18 weeks it would have taken with a custom code approach.

Previously, AXA Luxembourg had to start from scratch each time the business required new functionality, services or products. Today, thanks to the new integrations, all data is available via APIs and available in Salesforce Financial Services Cloud and employees only have to enter information in one system, as opposed to four.

“We are astounded by the development speed and automation we have achieved. Teams no longer have to do duplicative, manual work and our internal processes are now much faster than ever before — leaving more time for innovation,” said Olivier Vansteelandt, CIO, AXA Luxembourg.

Building a single view of their customers

For AXA Luxembourg, developing a single customer view was critical to enhancing the customer experience and enabling employees to resolve customer inquiries faster while personalizing interactions.

That’s why their entire team rallied behind launching a Customer 360 project using the Salesforce Customer 360 Platform and MuleSoft’s Anypoint Platform.

Thanks to MuleSoft’s prebuilt Salesforce connectors — such as the Sales Cloud and Service Cloud Connectors, the AXA Luxembourg team was able to connect all systems in just one year.

“Launching our Customer 360 project was a huge and impressive transformation for us. By leveraging MuleSoft and Salesforce, we are now delivering projects 3X faster than before.”

Olivier Vansteelandt CIO, AXA Luxembourg.

“It was not only a technological transformation, it was also a human and process transformation because it allowed us to truly change the way we operate our business. Thanks to MuleSoft’s library of reusable APIs and integrations, we now prioritize reuse — as opposed to building from scratch using custom code,” said Olivier Vansteelandt, CIO, AXA Luxembourg.

The reusable foundation AXA Luxembourg built continues to help the team deliver new customer innovations and meet critical digital initiatives.

Delivering projects 3X faster

With MuleSoft and Salesforce, AXA Luxembourg improved the end-to-end customer experience and made it easier for employees to productively serve customers.

By moving beyond custom-coded integrations and embracing API-led integration, the team can now deliver integrations 30% faster than before. This means that teams spend 25% less time doing manual work and, as a result, can dedicate more time to innovation.

The team’s focus on building reusable integrations means that now 60% of APIs are reused for future projects. And, for some projects, that number is even higher.

“Now when we build something, we know it can be reused for other projects, which means we not only speed up development, but we are spending more time building innovative solutions for our customers,” said Warnand.

Single view of customer

Accelerated delivery, automated security

Anypoint Exchange, Mule runtime engine

A 3-step guide to insurance transformation

Learn why insurance transformation requires rethinking the traditional IT operating model and how an API-first strategy can help

Keep exploring stories like this one

Legal & General GI takes the hassle out of home insurance with an API-powered, online tool that generates customers' insurance quotes in 90 seconds.

PacificComp adopts APIs to reinvent their business model — shifting from a direct sales model to outside brokers.

Liberty saves millions of dollars using API-led connectivity

You have been redirected

You have been redirected to this page because Servicetrace has been acquired by MuleSoft. Click here to learn more.

After 17 years of reporting on the API economy, ProgrammableWeb has made the decision to shut down operations. Click here to learn more.

Cette page est disponible en Français

Voir en Français

Verfügbar in Deutsch

Diese Seite gibt es auch auf Deutsch

Deutsche Seite

Stay on English page

Esta página está disponible en español

Ver en español

Essa página está disponível em Português

Veja-a em Português

このページは日本語でもご利用いただけます

• Solutions for a single view of your customer
• Building a platform for digital insurance
• Building a single customer view using APIs

Case Study: ‘Single Customer View’ Solution for Holistic and Aggregated Customer Data

Dive into this case study to learn how Nsight helped a global telecommunications company get a simplified and unified representation of its fragmented customer data. Learn about the extensive range of advanced SAP tools available and how we used them to customize a flexible, cost-effective solution for the client’s unique business requirements. You will also learn how Nsight tackled issues like tedious manual processes and retrieving customer information for the client as part of the project.

Related resources

Strengthening P2P and OTC Process Management through SAP and Accounting Case Study

Streamline the quoting process to close deals faster and smarter Brochure

Learn How a Leading Manufacturer Transformed CX with Adobe Commerce and ERP Integration Webinar

Digital Transformation

• Customer Experience
• Supply Chain Management
• Big Data and Analytics
• Robotic Process Automation
• Human Capital Management
• Infrastructure
• Application Development
• Process Outsourcing
• IT Merger and Acquisitions
• Cloud Migration
• Data Integration
• Product Engineering
• Governance, Risk and Compliance
• ERP Assessment
• Manufacturing
• Retail and Distribution
• Construction
• Other Industries

Copyright © 2024 Nsight. All Rights Reserved | Privacy and Cookies

—Please choose an option—

Upload Resume DOCX,DOC,PDF file format is supported