How to Choose the Most Robust Tool for Single Customer View

360-degree view.

Unified customer truth.

Singular customer narrative.

You may have encountered these terms in pitches by tech stack partners or in various marketing blogs in the tech-led advertising ecosystem.

These terms refer to "single customer view", i.e., a method to gather and combine diverse data points to form a complete picture of your customers. Think of these data points as pieces of a puzzle. The single customer view is what you get when you put the pieces together.

A single customer view tool (SCV tool) creates a comprehensive profile that incorporates all the insights you have about a customer. Rather than the information existing in silos across different platforms, a single customer view means rendering the data in one place to create holistic master profiles for each customer.

Benefits of single customer view

Brands understand that disparate customer data is an obstacle to hyper-personalization. You can enhance brand loyalty with customer data, which will lead to a high ROI on marketing spend. A single customer view is essential to understand each customer's needs, preferences, affinities, and key moments in the buying journey.

Having a single customer view for each customer delivers the following benefits -

1) Targeting precise customer cohorts and segment

You can segment customers based on their interests, or classify them into cohorts, only when you have cohort-based identity data that you have collected for a segment of customers over a long period. With a single customer view tool, you can organize customers as part of a single segment and get holistic visibility of the data points to inform your business decisions. What's more - with lookalike modeling, you have the opportunity to scale the reach of your campaigns by using attributes similar to your existing customers.

2) Creating a hyper-personalized omnichannel customer experience

With a single customer view, you have clarity on when your customers are the most active on a specific channel, which brands and lifestyle choices they prefer, and even every customer service conversation they have.

These insights help marketers target the customer at the right time and on the right channel and device because the information gives them sharp cues on hyper-personalization.

3) Breaking through data silos

Siloed customer data means critical data points sit on disparate systems and platforms. Data points don't interact with each other to create value because silos are a roadblock to personalization.

For example, you are showing an ad for a specific product to customer X. With a single customer view, you will know when to follow up and with what creatives and messaging depending on their preferences. If the data were siloed, you might confuse them with wrong offers and reminders, thus indicating that they are not a priority.

4) Enabling data-driven decisions for product strategy, GTM, marketing, and advertising

With a single customer view, hard data related to your customer's journey will back all your strategies. You will not have to base your campaigns on disconnected data or worse, assumptions.

A single customer view tool will give you a comprehensive picture to shape your campaigns, roll out relevant loyalty programs, up-sell and cross-sell, and even rejig product and GTM strategies based on sharp and holistic data points.

Features and functions of a robust SCV tool

You know the benefits of a single customer view. But how do you know if the tool you are considering to build this view will fetch you the best results?

Here's a handy list of features that every robust single customer view tool must incorporate -

That ability to understand the customer and truly discover who they are in real time to create strong relevancy will ultimately boost your ROIs.

Feature #1: Holistic data enrichment, including third-party data sources

A robust single customer view tool should be able to synthesize first, second, and third-party data sources to enrich your customer profiles and strengthen customer insight. First-party data is usually insufficient to provide a complete picture, so choose a tool that allows for third-party data enrichment. This will help you gain holistic, single truth about your customers, primed with fresh attributes leading to high ROI.

Feature #2: Identity resolution to achieve a single source of truth about each customer

You need a goldmine of accurate data about a single customer, and identity resolution delivers this. A robust single customer view identifies data points across different touchpoints and updates data sets when these identifiers change. For example, has the customer moved cities or had changed devices recently? Your SCV tool must reflect the ability to validate data identifiers across devices to create a single master profile.

Feature #3: Data integration across the tech stack

Since the point of a single customer view is to extract data from each silo, it needs to integrate with all your data platforms and be able to compile information from all of them. These include your martech platforms such as your lead generation funnels, email marketing software, and CRM. The tool should also integrate with your ad tech stack, which will consist of media buying platforms, and of course, your customer experience platforms.

Feature #4: Privacy and compliance that stays up to date

The modern customer is privacy-conscious. 47% of consumers may switch brands over data concerns. The weight of GDPR compliances is also a factor, as evident in the $888M fine on Amazon.

Ideally, your SCV tool should follow customer consent principles and have in-built safeguards that redact personally identifiable information from those that don't need that access. More importantly, because privacy regulations are a dynamic aspect, your SCV tool should continuously update compliance in line with changing local, regional, and global regulations.

Feature #5: Data accuracy checks and update

An SCV tool cannot be static because your customer's profile is fluid. A robust tool should be able to add, update and remove information consistently to keep it aligned to your customer's attributes and preferences. Data updation and validation can include updating delivery preferences, brand affinities, lifestyle choices, geographic location, life stage etc. You should be able to back your customer touchpoints with accurate and updated insights.

Feature #6: Segmentation for precise targeting at scale

Your single customer view tool should be able to segment audiences based on their attributes and preferences. Only when you have distinguishable customer segments to activate can you realize the full potential of hyper-personalization and deliver campaigns with solid returns. Segmentation enables you to provide empathetic customer experiences at scale across channels without friction.

Before we go

Clearly, a single customer view is vital for every brand's advertising and marketing efforts and customer-obsessed and data-informed decision-making. Although extremely beneficial for business decision-making, a staggering 89% of businesses struggle to create SCV due to data and process inefficiencies.

But you now have help at hand.

Lifesight's single customer view tool creates identity-based customer graphs to deliver holistic customer profiles using all levels of data. It resolves customers digital identities, so you never have to go without data-backed decision-making. You will gain a competitive edge over other brands that do not prioritize 360-degree profiles of customers just because it's a long-term investment.

We have built data enrichment and integration, privacy controls, and accuracy checks into our platform. If you want high ROI for your investment in a single customer view tool, get in touch with us.