Why you need a single customer view

If you’re a small local business, you likely know all your loyal customers personally, and can easily bring to mind their purchase history, and likes and dislikes, whether they are good payers or not, and perhaps what their preferences are. It’s fairly simple then to build a mutually beneficial relationship that keeps them coming back.

Grow beyond a certain size however, and keeping track of all your customers, their history with you, and their preferences is next to impossible. Unless you have a system in place that brings all this data together. 

This is where a Single Customer View comes in, it’s vital for both good customer or supporter management, as well as compliance. 

So this is how it works. A Single Customer View unites all of an organisation’s data on an individual: every communication through every channel and every department of your business, every purchase, every contact and every personal detail and permission they’ve ever given you. It brings all of this valuable data – and more – into one place where you can access it instantly for a full and concise picture of that individual’s relationship with your organisation.

And this has huge benefits.

A 360˚ view of a customer gives you a better understanding of what they do and do not like; insight you can use to identify new opportunities – to cross and upsell for example, or for a charity, to understand what motivates that donor to give and how to engage them perhaps in other areas such as events or volunteering.

Understanding their channel preferences and what elements of your business or organisation they’re interested in will also help you create that all-important customer-centric approach. This will enable you to target them more appropriately and build genuine engagement and trust, and therefore loyalty and retention.

It will save you time and money too. Through the easy access it provides to every piece of data you have on your customers, it helps you to respond more quickly and accurately to communications and opportunities. In fact, having all your customer data in one place supports better insight and communication across the whole organisation, helping you to take that customer-centric approach business-wide.

And, where data protection and the GDPR are concerned, a Single Customer View is immensely valuable.

Firstly, it will help you comply with GDPR by making it much easier to record and access consent choices, and to ensure that when you interact or communicate with a supporter, every action is traceable. Having that Single Customer View also enables you to respond promptly to requests from individuals to see, transfer, amend or delete their data or to change their permissions. The assumption behind GDPR is that you know what data you hold about each individual in your systems, and can view, copy and delete it on request.

It also helps you keep up to date: personal data can change while in addition, an individual may have several phone numbers, emails, or cookie IDs at the same time. A Single Customer View ensures an individual continues to be recognised as such over time, should any or all of their identifiers change.

Certainly all of the above is essential for good customer or supporter management, as well as for compliance.  And, of course, not only will it help you build more informed, involved, and compliant relationships, but it will help you grow more revenue and build greater customer satisfaction in both the long and short term as a result.

If you need some help in creating a Single Customer View, Arc Data can help you review your current data and plan your next steps towards a true 360˚ view.  Email suzanne@arc-data.co.uk to find out more.