Single Customer View: The Missing Link to Cross-Channel Success

Marketing to customers in the digital age requires reaching them on their “channel of choice” in the proper context at the proper time. To do this effectively, you need a holistic, accurate view of your customer. However, a study, conducted in 2015, found that a mere 6 percent of the marketers surveyed have achieved a panoramic, single customer view. Without an integrated, cross-channel view of your customers, you cannot plan campaigns that offer the degree of contextual, consistent and relevant personalization that customers are increasingly demanding.

You cannot compile a single customer view by taking fragmented tidbits of data from separate touch points and attempting to compile them into a complete picture. One purchase, one tweet and one email from the customer do not tell you what you need to know. What about all of the other touch points? Has the customer visited your Facebook page, shopped in your physical store or interacted with your in-store kiosk? Does your customer access your website from his desktop computer or his smartphone? Did he visit your website to read your blog or search for product specifications? How long did the customer remain on each website page, and how many times did he return? How many orders has he placed, how much did he spend on each order and how often did he place an order? These are the types of questions you need answered if you want to create a single customer view.

You will face challenges when you move toward a single customer view. Marketers have identified the three primary challenges as insufficient data quality, siloed teams, and problems linking all technologies used. Fortunately, each of these issues can be addressed; although, it is normally best to break them into small, manageable pieces that can be resolved independently instead of attempting to handle the entire challenge in one massive push.

If your data is not reliable, your customer views will contain inaccuracies or be far from complete. If you want to achieve a true single customer view, you must first ensure that your data is of sufficient quality to provide you with the accurate information that you need.

There are many different ways to manage marketing teams. Unfortunately, many companies have siloed teams that rarely interact with other marketing teams within the organization. For example, marketing teams may be divided by channels, with one team managing the social sites, another team managing email campaigns, and a third managing the website. Each team executes its own campaigns and measures the performance for its own efforts alone. As a result, the individual teams might have a view of the customer that only encompasses its own efforts.

The more channels you use, the greater the variety of the technologies used will become. Different channels require different technologies for communicating with your customers. Communicating with your customers based on touch points will not help you craft communications that recognize each customer’s uniqueness. 

Panoramic customer views do not happen overnight. It will take time and effort to achieve a fully integrated view of your customer, but it can mean substantial rewards in the future making it well worth the journey.