Creating a Unified View of the Customer

Data is the fuel of modern marketing campaigns. Regardless of the type of business, you probably collect a vast array of customer data and use it to inform your marketing strategy. Most businesses also use a variety of tools to collect and manage data.

For some businesses, the different sources of data can be an issue. You have data coming from many different places, and this can create different perspectives depending on the source you are using at any given time. To get more from your customer data, you need to do what you can to create a unified view of the customer.

The Benefits of Having a Unified View of the Customer

Your customers probably interact with your brand through many different channels. They might go to your website, interact with your social media accounts, contact customer service, and more. Beyond that, you might have a variety of other data points you can draw on to get information about a customer.

All of these data sources can be valuable on their own, but they can be more powerful when you can bring use them together to create a more complete view of the customer. This is what many call the unified or single customer view. It would include all of the touchpoint data, demographics, descriptive data and more to create a profile of the customer.

One of the benefits of the unified customer view is that it can be more effective for personalization. According to Epsilon, about 80% of customers say they are more likely to do business with companies that offer personalized experiences. The unified customer view helps you do that by bringing all of the customer data together to create a more complete profile of the customer.

It can also help marketers develop strategies that are more consistent and more effective across marketing channels. You will be able to create more complete customer profiles to use on different marketing platforms and you will have a more complete dataset to measure the effectiveness of campaigns and strategies.

Having a unified view of customer data also makes the resources more accessible. Instead of relying on incomplete resources or having to track data down from several different sources, employees will have everything they need in one database. This makes the data much more accessible and it also makes it easier for teams to benefit from using the data.

Know Your Data Resources

The first step in creating a unified view of the customer is having the data. Your business probably already has customer data from a lot of sources. Take the time to assess this data, list the resources you use for collecting data and determine if there are any gaps that may need to be filled in.

If you have a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, that would be a good place to start with customer data. Beyond your CRM, you might have data from your point of sale, contact info customers shared with you, website data, social media interactions, product usage data, demographic information, marketing data, location data, purchase history and more. Many businesses will also have third-party data that could be useful for creating a unified view of the customer.

Use the Right Tools to Bring it Together

Having all of the above-mentioned data is good, but it needs to be brought together if you want to leverage it to its full potential. When you can put it all together, you get the benefits of a unified view of the customer.

The data can be processed and integrated manually, but a tool like a customer data platform (CDP) can do much of the work for you. A CDP is a software tool that processes and aggregates data from multiple sources to create a single, centralized resource for customer data. Many of these tools also come with a variety of features and functions to make data more accessible and easier to use.

Along with bringing the data together, many CDP systems even have the ability to process and clean data. That means it can recognize duplicates or find data that was improperly entered and remove it. Some might even have features to automatically resolve customer identities to create unique profiles for different customers in the database. The right CDP tool might also be able to offer analytics features to help connect the dots and inform decisions.

With the right data, you can know more about the customer journey and do more to guide it in the right direction. The only problem is that many data resources are siloed off from each other at most organizations. That is why businesses need to do what they can to unify the customer data they have and use the right tools to leverage that data.