Single customer view: How well is your CDP platform serving you?

This post was written in collaboration with Treasure Data.

You can’t think of marketing today without exploring the world of data. Data is the fuel to all things marketing for any brand looking to engage consumers in an intimate manner, and build loyalty.

While the amount of data available to marketers today has increased immensely because of the numerous touch-points available, and the fragmentation of the media, making sense of the data has also become a whole lot more complicated.

For one thing, not all data is necessarily good data. Sometimes the data sets are incomplete or unclear. Sometimes they are just downright dirty and contain false information. As such, marketers must ensure they invest in first party data for optimal results.

Meanwhile, with personalisation being a key element of a great customer experience, marketers must now also make sense of all of the layers of data collected and distil them into a single customer view.

What does single customer view really mean?

So, you’ve heard the term single customer view, which is sometimes also referred to as SCV. But what does it really mean, and why should you care?

Well, single customer views are essentially dashboards containing the customer data for one single person. This unified view of the one single customer contains all of their personally identifiable information such as their name, mobile number, address, age, as well as purchase history, loyalty programme activity, and previous communications. This then helps you have a clear understanding of the customer spending with your brand.

For the B2B marketing industry, which banks big on account-based marketing, the single customer view can be helpful for marketers and sales professionals to really understand who the ultimate decision maker is, and the challenges they face. This then helps your organisation garner insights around them to develop better personas and campaigns allowing for personalisation, which ultimately leads to greater customer experiences.

In most cases, customer data platforms enable marketers across most industries to have the single customer view through a deep dive by either analysing or building a market segment, or segmenting what you want to look at when it comes to each individual’s spending habits.

Typically, customer data platforms can help produce single customer views when you drill down from your big data collection pool. But marketers need to be aware that different customer data platform vendors vary quite a bit in the information they include. How they present the information, and the ease at which information can be accessed, also plays a huge role in the democratisation of data across different departments of your company.

Information such as name, email, phone number and address, as well as demographics such as age, birthday, gender, and marital status are fairly common and considered basic information. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that different businesses care about different types of data.

That’s why, in addition to common demographic and purchase information, some providers allow you to easily customise the data which will be crucial to your business and contain the information most important to your business.

Deciphering a good single customer view platform

Before embarking on any new potential partnership, ask any potential customer data platform vendor if they allow you to customise views, and whether they provide easy tools to help you do that.

For example, Treasure Data makes available pre-built codes and tools to help customise the single view of the customer called “Treasure Boxes”. This allows companies to track unique business metrics in a customised manner.

Less common are entries such as “consent information” which details the customer’s privacy preferences and shows you how your customer wishes you to use (or not use) private information. This is getting more and more vital in the age of privacy, as privacy takes the forefront in communications with consumers.

Mature customer data platform vendors and providers such as Treasure Data also include helpful calculations based on your customer’s data and behaviour within your single customer view, such as the current customer lifetime value and total revenue spent at the store to date. This view also includes recent purchase information, loyalty app usage, segments, and predictive scores.

Here are some other helpful tips to help you with your selection of a partner:

• Is the information provided sufficient for your business’ basic needs?
• Is the information easy to look at?
• Is the user interface intuitive and easy to understand?
• Can you get a good picture of an individual customer in a segment?
• Can you search on any or all fields, or are you stuck with “fill-in-the-field” search capabilities?
• Does the CDP provider offer easy-to-use tools and codes for quick customisation?
• Can you see or search for event, behavioural or journey data such as purchases, visits or emails?
• Can you see segment inclusion data?
• Can you see machine learning data such as the best time to engage, best channels and propensities?

The Treasure Data Customer Data Platform (CDP) empowers enterprises by delivering rich insights that drive outstanding customer experiences. Built on a strong data management foundation, our CDP enables brands to securely unify customer data across silos at scale so they can better identify, engage and acquire customers.

The highly configurable platform boasts a comprehensive connector network that evolves with your existing technology stack to future-proof all customer data initiatives. Treasure Data has more than 400 customers, including Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises.

For more information, please visit www.treasuredata.com.