Why do we need a single customer view?
The idea of a single customer view (SCV) has been around for many years, born out of the need for businesses to understand how customers are interacting with their brand, and to obtain a complete view of customer interactions and purchases.
Understanding engagement at the customer or prospect level (and not just campaign by campaign) can drive more in-depth campaign analysis, resulting in more informed business decisions and demonstrating return on marketing investment — something that’s high on every marketer’s agenda, especially in the current economic environment.
Historically consumer focused, the fairly straightforward idea of having one single record that delivers a summarised view can be applied in so many areas – not least in B2B lead generation and prospecting programmes.
What are the key benefits of a single customer view?
I would summarise the main benefits as follows:
- Improved productivity and efficiency from lead generation activity
- Increased likelihood of conversion – the more we know about a prospect’s engagement, the more influence we can have over the prospect journey to increase the likelihood of conversion
- Better budget allocation on higher value prospects through smarter segmentation of data
- Creation of bespoke contact strategies using analysis and insight to identify the best mix of communication channels
- Greater depth of understanding through tailored data collection, analysis and output – allowing more relevant communication with prospects
- Improved forecasting control – a SCV can support data insights to measure the potential of the prospect universe
- Cross-selling opportunities to current customers where the SCV integrates customers and prospects
- Informed acquisition of new customers based on insight derived from current customers
How difficult is it to achieve, and is it worth it?
A true SCV is deemed the ‘holy grail’ as it is very difficult to achieve due to the continual evolution of technology and data. The ever-increasing number of marketing channels also presents challenges. In reality, I’m sure that very few businesses can honestly say that they have a complete SCV currently in place for marketing – if they do, I’d love to see it!
Is it worth it? Well yes it is…or should be! The more information we can collect, the more questions we can ask and answer, the better informed we are. Consumers are making more and more information about themselves available in the public domain, and it’s down to us to start hoovering it up. We need to gather it, integrate it and use it to help shape marketing strategies.
Even at a simplistic level, using a SCV will enable us to analyse the channels a prospect is engaging with, and should help define how you communicate to them in future. It might be seen as Big Brother behaviour, but for enterprise account based marketing, building a profile of high-level contacts and knowing things like individual interests and hobbies, group memberships and employment history can help start a very effective communication process.
What are the main steps in obtaining strong enough data for a single customer view?
Now more than ever, the wealth of data available on any one customer or prospect is immense. Offline media, websites, social media, events, direct mail, email and telemarketing are all areas and channels where data can be collected and fed into a SCV.
In the B2B environment, the challenge is increased by the complexity of company structures and contacts responsible for multiple areas. Getting to the right decision maker or influencer for the product you are selling is, and always will be, a key focus for B2B marketers.
By adopting some of the SCV thinking and techniques, we can create group views, company views, department views and influencer views that can all be linked, with information flowing between the multiple levels delivering all the benefits of a SCV in the consumer market.
Our next challenge? Making sure we ask the right questions of the data and get the insight needed to deliver successful results-driven sales and marketing campaigns.
What tools are available to help us?
Many CRM systems and solutions now implement the SCV from within, using increasingly intelligent data gathering and integration techniques. Sales and marketing software such as Salesforce.com is widely used by big enterprise organisations and is continually evolving to integrate with new data collection channels and digital data.
But are businesses actually using these types of systems to their full potential, especially from a marketing point of view? Experience tells us that this is infrequently the case. We know that getting to a true SCV is and always will be challenging, but these tools can be extremely useful for getting as close to customers as possible.
Through the right technology and effective planning, the challenges we face in increasing our customer and prospect views can be significantly reduced. We may never achieve a complete single view but we can get pretty close if we use all the tools and data at our fingertips.