A Unified Customer View: Get Clarity to Power Your Business
You wouldn’t try to complete a jigsaw puzzle with only half the pieces, so why would you take the same approach when it comes to marketing your business? For companies that market their products or services online, it’s more important than ever to have a unified customer view.
Let’s consider Black Friday 2023. According to Adobe Analytics, online sales on Black Friday in the U.S. hit approximately $9.8 billion, which was a 7.5% increase over last year. With so many shoppers turning to online shopping and spending more money than ever, it’s essential to have a holistic understanding of each customer’s preferences and online behavior to create personalized experiences that resonate with them.
In the modern digital space, there’s a steady stream of data coming from various channels and multiple sources. It can be confusing for brands to try to digest, organize, and understand all this data. However, doing so is key, because understanding your customers is essential for any thriving business.
Imagine each bit of information about your customers, from their consistent social media habits to their late night online shopping sprees, is its own individual puzzle piece. By putting all these pieces together in the proper way, you’ll be able to see the final picture of the jigsaw puzzle. Welcome to the world of a “unified customer view.” This is also known by the terms “customer 360 view or "single customer view.” This crucial tool merges a myriad of confusing data into an easy-to-understand source of truth.
What is a Unified Customer View?
Let's dig a bit into what a unified customer view is. It is the foundation of customer data. It collates every nitty-gritty detail about a customer, their preferences, characteristics, behavior, and interactions, and blends them into a single, usable profile that will effectively blend their existing data into a unified customer view.
It's like a constantly updated biography of each consumer, helping businesses personalize content and offers to show customers how important they truly are. Without such a holistic view, businesses are at risk of falling short in customer communication and campaign management.
The challenging part of this approach for many businesses is finding the right solution to actually create a unified customer view. Creating an accurate and credible unified customer view isn't easy work, but it isn’t rocket science, either. It's a task that requires tackling technical obstacles head-on and finding a top-tier Customer Data Platform (CDP) or Audience Management Platform (AMP) that can take in data regardless of its format, create an enduring identity, grant access to necessary teams, and perform tasks efficiently.
Why is Customer Data So Complex?
To put it simply, people are complex creatures, and they change like chameleons. They switch jobs, phone numbers, and email addresses — and they shift their likes and dislikes, frequently. Not to mention, customers interact with businesses through numerous channels like social media, emails, phone calls, websites, or the good old-fashioned brick-and-mortar stores.
This behavior leads to a constant influx of ever-changing, scattered data that’s virtually impossible to piece together, especially when you're dealing with multiple systems and platforms that weren't built to communicate with each other.
In today’s cluttered data ecosystem, business owners are firing blind if they aren’t utilizing data insights to help dictate their brand marketing decisions. With access to unified customer profile data, business owners no longer have to wonder whether they are targeting their ads to the right audience. A known audience to start with means depper levels of understanding as customers work through the path to purchase, sending digital signals along the way. It’s essential for business owners to understand the important of building a comprehensive, unified customer view.
Building a Comprehensive Customer View
Let's look at what you need to create this all-encompassing customer view.
Accuracy
When it comes to a unified customer view, accuracy is key. The way to ensure accuracy is through identity resolution, which is the process of collecting and matching identifiers across different datasets to build a unique representation of an individual. In other words, identity resolution converts a mess of data into a treasure chest of meaningful information. It's important to work with a CDP or AMP that specializes in identity resolution, because you want to avoid targeting the same customers multiple times or overlooking valuable ones. These tactics lead to poor personalization and dismal customer experiences.
Transparency
In order to have a unified customer view, it’s important to have transparency into the data you’re collecting, storing, and analyzing. This will ensure more accurate data insights and the ability to create personalized customer experiences. Transparent data practices contribute to the accuracy of the unified customer view by ensuring that the information is up-to-date and relevant. This accuracy is vital for delivering personalized experiences, as it enables organizations to understand customer preferences, behaviors, and needs. By utilizing a CDP or AMP that is self-serve and easy to use, team members don’t need to be data scientists to be able to peek into the data insights that have been gathered and organized, leading to more targeted and meaningful interactions.
Comprehensiveness
The phrase "unified view" should hold true. All the information about a customer, including buying behaviors, social media interactions, email responses, and offline data (gold star if this process is hassle-free!) should all be wrapped up neatly in one comprehensive package.
Utilizing Your Customer Data
With these cornerstones in place, the path to extracting value from customer data is lit. But there's more to it than just dumping data into a system.
To start off, the CDP or AMP you choose to work with must be flexible enough to digest the data in whatever format you throw it, or it should provide clear instructions on how to reformat the data in order to process it effectively. Once the data pipeplines have been set up and data is flowing in, the next step is to make sense of it. This is where the data must be organized into a comprehensive customer view that passes muster. The ideal solution would allow different teams within an organization to create their unique customer views as per their needs.
And then comes the real deal: You use this organized data for fine-tuning your marketing strategy. For instance, by having your data aggregated, you can begin discerning customer attributes like their lifetime value (LTV) or their preferences. Some CDPs and AMPs can let you tweak the customer attributes as per your evolving needs, ensuring they remain relevant.
With this goldmine of quality data in your hands, the sky's the limit! With a decentralized database, you can pinpoint high-value customers, create look-alike audiences to attract similar customers, and craft personalized multi-channel marketing campaigns. Suddenly, the process of obtaining a unifiied customer view doesn't seem so intimidating after all.
Show Me the Money: Business Impact of a Unified Customer View
When you witness the transformation that a unified customer view brings, you'll likely ask yourself, "Why didn't I do this sooner?" For starters, it can save you money — your AMP won't cost you an arm and a leg.
This isn't just a flash in the pan; the business impact is tangible and substantial.
The first concrete effect you'll see is an enhancement of your marketing strategy. With more accurate targeting, your ROI on marketing campaigns will take a steep upward climb. Businesses that have baked unified customer views into their operations have seen their profits soar.
The second effect you’ll see is a notably improved customer experience. Instead of attempting to construct a puzzle with half the pieces, you can now approach and engage with your customers in ways that truly resonate with them. You start speaking their language and offering them solutions tailored to their needs, thereby bolstering that ever-so-crucial customer loyalty and satisfaction. Who wouldn't want a customer singing their praises?
Lastly, decision-making becomes much less of a guessing game. With streamlined customer data, business leaders can gain valuable insights to make well-informed decisions for their organizations. It truly becomes an empowering tool in the hands of a business.
In the End, It's All About Clarity
You might be thinking, "This unified customer view stuff seems like a tough nut to crack." And you're right; it's no walk in the park. But the repercussions of doing nothing could be just as dire. The competitive business landscape waits for no one.
Businesses that stick with the status quo are often left behind, while visionary companies lead the race. By partnering with a company like VisitIQ, you can use our data-driven Solutions to help through every step of obtaining a unifiied customer view.
Ultimately, a unified customer view helps shake off the fog that's clouding your understanding of your customers. It strips down the complexities of scattered, inconsistent data, replacing it with a seamless, comprehensive view of each customer.
So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today, and we’ll help you clearly see the sophistication and nuances of customer behavior. After all, clarity is power, especially when it's about your customers!
