DOCUMENT/DATA MANAGEMENT
THE SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW
Martyn Leman, CEO of Cloud Perspective, looks at what lessons can be learnt as businesses move from the high street to online shopping and the importance of accurate customer data.
Accurate customer data is one potential starting point of a digital transformation journey. The death of the high street is widely reported, and this demise extends to any business with customer or client interactions. Why this is the case requires a little more consideration than the often-blamed rise of online shopping.
Convenience, cost and service personalisation are the three identifiable reasons why individuals are choosing the online purchasing option rather than the in-store experience.
What is the single customer view? “Excellent customer
In the past, high street organisations invested deeply in personal service, for example, tailored services for the individual walking through the door. Some stores might even have employed shop assistants who not only helped shoppers with their choices but provided background information about the items, the designer and, perhaps, gossip about who else had invested in these latest styles.
service starts with basic knowledge, leading
Most businesses have multiple views of the same customer; this might be by accident or by design. The majority of businesses of any scale have multiple databases that might contain information about one customer numerous times. Each of these databases contains elements of information about an individual customer that if combined, would create a single customer view of that individual.
ultimately to extensive and intimate insights about the customer.”
Why is this important? At its simplest, it might well prevent one of those systems offering the customer something they already have, this demonstration of the lack of customer knowledge immediately deters the
customer from buying additional services. In more complex examples, it prevents the
customer-owning organisation from analysing the
In current times, off-the-peg options and merchandising displays have replaced this personal attention. Convenience and lower cost; a trade-off for the loss of personal service.
What the high street has lost has been the internet’s gain where the successful online business can offer convenience, cost, and service personalisation.
The greatest success in this area is, of course, Amazon. Consider, when you log onto your Amazon account, it knows you, it offers details of your purchasing history and, even before you reach the checkout it provides you with a range of alternatives varying in terms of cost, delivery and even additional items you may want to buy.
customer’s data, maximising the perceived customer services experience and preventing maximum revenue gain from that customer.
So, it’s simple then? In concept yes, getting a single customer view is straightforward, in practice though the problem is a little harder.
“Convenience, cost and service
personalisation are the three identifiable reasons
Not every business can be Amazon, but theirs and your starting point should be accurate customer or client information and the single customer view. Excellent customer service starts with basic knowledge, leading ultimately to extensive and intimate insights about the customer – while always keeping an emphasis on avoiding being ‘creepy’.
40 | TOMORROW’S FM
why individuals are choosing the online purchasing option rather than the in-store experience.”
Cast your mind back to our high street company. Even in a relatively small country like the UK, that company may have 10 million individual customers - which across five different systems equates to 50m records. Now factor in inevitable customer duplication at between 10-20% and human data entry error, cleansing this data begins to look like an enormous task. Now consider that the business may be multinational and we can start to understand why data projects fail.
However, help is at hand. There are some businesses that exist to specialise in knitting together diverse data strands to create an accurate and usable view of the customer from a data perspective and can demonstrate success on multiple occasions with numerous multinational conglomerate businesses. It’s
just a simple matter of hunting these unicorns.
www.cloudperspective.co.uk
twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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