There is no doubt that the pandemic has drastically changed the game for businesses across all industries, and fast. One common theme has emerged to adapt to these changes: “Accelerated Digital Transformation”. In retail, with competition getting fiercer by the day, we have seen brands focusing on adopting new agile technologies, like customer data platforms, with the main objective to deliver highly personalized customer experience across all channels. That would require creating Single Customer View (“SCV”) that transcends all customer touch-points.

Not sure what SCV means? This article will walk you through the concept’s nitty-gritty details and tell you why you need it now more than ever.

What Is a Single Customer View?

A Single Customer View or SCV is the process of collecting real-time data from disparate online and offline data sources, then bringing them together and merging them to form a single, accurate record for each customer. It’s also known as “360-degree customer view,” or ” Golden Record.”

The good news is that Customer Data Platforms were created to do the grunt work needed to provide the much-needed Single Customer View for marketers and make it accessible to your marketing tools.

Why Is a Single Customer View Important?

There are several good reasons to create a single customer view. Here are three of them:

1. Enable Customer Segmentation for Data-Driven Decisions

The era for guesswork and on-size-fits-all has ended long time ago. With SCV, you can use your accurate data to easily segment your customers into smaller groups that share the same attributes and behaviors such as channel affinity, preferred language, location, purchase history, buyer lifecycle stage.

Such advanced segmentation enables you to better tailor your offering and personalized communication; which will eventually lead to more successful marketing campaigns and improved customer experience.

2. Facilitate Multi-Channel Marketing

As of October 2020, 59 percent of the global population were active online. This statistic has pushed all offline retailers to focus on building or enhancing their online presence in the last year. However, it is important to note that offline shopping still represents today more than 85% of total shopping; so it cannot be ignored.

Thanks to the Single Customer View; you can now recreate your customers’ complete omni-channel journey with your brand, and optimize your marketing spend online as well as accurately track performance of your campaigns.

A 360-degree customer view makes multi-channel marketing more manageable and successful.

To consolidate your cross-channel marketing efforts, you can use an omnichannel marketing platform to stay relevant and competitive in this crowded market.

3. Improve Customer Loyalty and Experience

Mass marketing not only seems impersonal and irrelevant, but also annoys the customer. On the other hand; delivering a highly personalized, timely and relevant marketing message to the customer is key to increasing customer loyalty and improving customer experience.

Single customer view gives you that ability to send hyper personalized marketing, which is critical to improving the customer experience.

Actionable customer data for proactive businesses

In summary, implementing a single view of the customer is undoubtedly an essential step in significantly improving the customer experience. By unifying customer identities across all offline and online touch-points and making the single view of the customer available in real-time, you can more easily bridge the gap between customer expectations and customer experience. As a result, you’ll see improved customer loyalty, increased customer satisfaction, improved process efficiency, and better customer service and support.

To see how you can easily create a Single Customer view for your organization, check UrbanBuz Customer Data Platform here or just simply request a demo