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I can remember the first time that I ever got involved in creating a single customer view database. It was in the late 1980s. At that time I was working for a financial company who wanted to bring together various product databases, home insurance, car insurances, life products, as well as their loan products. The priority at the time was to understand which customers held multiple products with us and to use this knowledge to try and cross sell more effectively.
Now 20 years on, many companies now have all their product information in a single customer view and use it with great success. However, many others seem to be missing a trick in developing this further. Whilst companies once had product silos, now increasingly we see data held in channel silos.
It is all too common to see separate ‘pots’ of data for direct mail, email, sms, web activity and increasingly for social media, without any regular process for bringing them together. I believe that companies are really missing opportunities by not making this happen.
The logic of having all this customer contact data together in a single customer view, alongside sales data makes sense to most marketers. After all, the companies are able to take this more holistic view of their customers and their multi-channel interactions should be able to communicate with more relevant and timely offers. So why aren’t more companies doing it?
There are probably two main reasons: the historical purchase of individual components from different suppliers and the lack of a marketer-friendly platform to hold the sometimes vast amounts of data generated particularly by the digital channels.
As some of these channels are relatively new, often technology is adopted to deliver each communication. These individual technologies from multiple suppliers then become silos, each holding data for just a single channel. Historically, marketers didn’t really have a choice, but now with certain key companies building out offerings across multiple channels, increasingly there is the opportunity to easily take these services from a single supplier.
Regardless, even with these individual silos, it would be perfectly possible for the smart marketer to bring this data together. However, for many, the lack of a marketing-friendly central database able to be automatically fed by these silos acts as a barrier for marketing to have such a single customer view.
As consumers, we each find it faintly absurd when companies deal with us in a disjointed way and, conversely, can be hugely impressed when companies get it right. Wouldn’t we all like a company to understand that we visited their website, searched through different products and were close to buying? We’d be impressed if that organization sent a follow up email encouraging our purchase. We’d probably respect the company even more if our conversations with the call center and via social media were also acknowledged in this email.
It is clearly not a five minute exercise to create this utopian world of a totally integrated, single customer view. However, with the expansion of companies offering this service and the power of marketing friendly databases able to hold the wealth of channel data now available, it is increasingly possible and definitely desirable.
