By Andrew Hackett

    

Are you looking for ways to better understand your customer and their journey with your business? In a competitive marketplace, having an accurate understanding of your customers is key in developing strong customer relationships.

Knowing who exactly your customers are, what they need and when they need it ensures the business can better serve them. A single view of the customer (SVOC) helps create this kind of clarity by providing organisations with real-time access to data from across all systems in order to get a holistic view of customer behaviour. By using SVOC as part of their overall customer experience strategy, business leaders can better understand the needs and wants of their audience, increase customer loyalty, and maximise ROI.

Below we’ll explore what exactly a single view of customer is and how it benefits businesses—providing actionable information and advice with which you can begin to envision how your business can achieve its goals using SVOC.

What Is Single View And How Does It Work?

Single view of customer is an approach that enables businesses to create a holistic profile of an individual customer. Data from multiple disparate sources such as sales orders, marketing activities, customer service interactions, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing database and transactional databases, etc are all collected and consolidated into a Customer Data profile (CDP) platform to create a single view of the customer.

This means having the ability to integrate all available customer data across departments, channels, and touchpoints for entire journeys along the customer life cycle. This in turn requires interconnectivity between different systems and software to draw a comprehensive picture of customer activity.

This includes assembling data from traditional CRMs, web analytics packages, marketing automation tools, social media sites, enterprise applications and more to unite customers’ experiences across multiple touchpoints into a single view. To create such a single source of truth, every system and application capturing customer data must be streamlined together in terms of formatting and structure as well as continuously updated with new customer data as it becomes available. 

Essentially, organizations need to deploy a composable architecture that supports distributed computing via synchronized microservices or APIs. The thought process behind this is to create an ecosystem where all components store the same information but still remain decentralized – ultimately creating a single view of the customer anywhere at any given time.

With this, organizations can develop insights that lead to meaningful interactions with customers focused on their individual needs and preferences. With these systems in place, businesses can have better relationships with current customers and more effectively target new ones. SVOC helps companies generate an accurate portrayal of the wants and habits of their customers for a dependable picture to use in developing strategies and creating personalized experiences that are better tailored to their customer’s needs.

How Can A Single View Of Customer Benefit You?

SVOC is an invaluable tool for any retailer. The centralized view of a customer they attain allows companies to understand them better and build a more personalized customer experience, both in store and online.

Retailers can leverage this to understand how their customers shop, what they’re buying, when they’re shopping, why they are making certain purchases, and other preferences which can be used to customize experiences unique to each customer. This data also enables retailers to better segment customers, build stronger ties with repeat buyers, as well as develop more effective marketing strategies both on and offline. With careful analysis of this single view of the customer, retailers can achieve an omni-channel presence that strengthens their brand and provides positive value towards their future growth.

With this knowledge, retailers can devise more effective strategies to target customers with relevant products and messages, increasing conversion rates and ultimately boosting sales.

Additionally, utilizing single view of customer technology assists retailers in providing each customer with customized services such as tailored emails, targeted advertisements, and product recommendations. The relevant personalisation is persistent across all the channels as it is sourced from the CDP and then leveraged by the technology delivering the interactions.

In summary, single view of customer is an invaluable asset that can be leveraged by retailers to both understand their customers better and drive sales.

SVOC also enables businesses to predict likely future outcomes and behavioural patterns by leveraging insights from their consolidated customer data. Ultimately, having this single view of customer provides organizations the competitive edge needed in today’s complex digital landscape while delivering an enhanced customer experience to its consumers.

How Do You Achieve A Single View Of Customer?

Wouldn’t it be great to have been able to start to build this SVOC from the outset? Unfortunately, there are no greenfield implementations of single view, it’s entirely based on where a retailer is when they begin their journey as it’s almost certain that they will always have technology to build alongside or on top of in order to create that architecture they need to provide a single view.

But all is not lost. This means that the core component to achieving a single view of your customers is having a roadmap to get there.

This roadmap will likely be based on where a retailer is now technologically and operationally, what their problems are, what their long-term strategy is and what their aspirational goals are. Combining all of those factors to create a comprehensive roadmap potentially spanning years can seem daunting and while it may take some time and effort to achieve a single view of customer, the results are well worth it.

Ayata can help you plan and execute your journey to creating a 360-degree view of your customers. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you succeed.