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ACHIEVING YOUR


SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW
STEPS TO PREPARING A SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW
Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
C a n y o u r e a l l y h e l p y o u r
customer?
Your organisation’s goal is to make the
life of your customers easier. In order to
best serve your customers you need to
create a trustworthy view of their needs.
This white paper will walk you through
the steps for preparing a single customer
view in as little as three months.
Your Single Customer
View - Start Today
We have seen that automation in
business is not only a blessing,
but can also present challenges to
both employees and customers.
T h e r i s e o f m u l t i c h a n n e l
marketing now means that an
integrated view of the interaction
between your customer and your
business is no longer self-evident,
with simple changes in your
customer’s needs resulting in an
excessive number of actions and
communications within your
business. This in turn results in a
great deal of work and data
handling, thus a high likelihood of
human error and considerable
inconvenience to the customer.
The benefits of a Single Customer
View are not confined to Sales and
Marketing activities.


It can also deliver value for:
• Compliance
• First Time Right data-entry
• Self Service Marketing
• Operational Excellence
• Up-selling and Cross-selling Decision
Support
• Master Data Quality measures
• Basel II Privacy Fraud Prevention
• F S A S i n g l e C u s t o m e r V i e w
requirements (2010)
• Sa rbanes -Ox ley An t i -Te r ro r i sm
measures and Anti Money Laundering
measures
By providing your employees with the
exact information they need to perform
their roles, you can avoid service related
problems,
enable the generation of
higher revenues
through enhanced
identification of cross and up-sell
opportunities, and increase their overall
job satisfaction.

 
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
A Single Customer View (often
t e r m e d a 3 6 0 - d e g r e e o r
Integrated Customer View) often
invo lves data f rom severa l
systems. Customer data is stored
in a CRM system, customer
compla ints in a compla ints
database, payment history in
finance software and order history
in an ERP system.
A CRM system is not a Single
Customer View. Research by
Gartner has shown that investing
i n C R M s o f t wa r e i s n o t a
guarantee that you will serve your
customers better, even though
that was the purpose of the
investment. “Over US $ 75
billion was spent on CRM-
related business applications,
customer satisfaction has
edged up only sl ightly.” ,
Michael Maoz, Research VP and
Distinguished Analyst in Gartner
Research.
So, together with your employees
and some help from the market,
you will be able to realise a first
version of an integrated customer
view and benefit from its added
value in just a few months.
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“Fail to plan. Plan
to Fail.”
The all important first step is to
determine your goal. There are three
factors in determining the priority:
• The financial value: how much does
the organisation stand to gain?
• The time to value: meaning the time
between the start of the activity and the
stage at which you first benefit from
Single Customer View.
• The strategic value: the measure in
which the activity contributes to the
long-term business goal.
By adopting an incremental project plan
(e.g.: department by department
implementation), you can build up an
effective single customer view that is
valuable to the business as a whole. This
way you can help your employees to
support your customers more effectively
whilst simultaneously improving the
agility of your business.
For example; a telemarketer’s single
customer view contains different
information than that of a helpdesk
agent. The best approach is to start with
the department that is experiencing the
greatest challenges.

 
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
Achieving a robust
Single Customer View
It is in people’s nature to want to
contribute to something that
makes their l ife easier. The
organisations task is to bring
these people together and have
the group set a specific and
clearly defined set of goals. They
must then have the means to
achieve those goals. This consists
of time, a project plan and tools
with which to realise their single
customer view.
In practice three days should
allow an organisation to select the
r i g h t p e o p l e , c o l l e c t i v e l y
determine the first challenge and
draw up a proposed solution. It
may then require a period of three
weeks to determine where the
necessary information is located
and how to acquire it. During this
time a business case can be
drawn up based on the challenge
and the proposed solution. The
last step for the result is actually
implementing the first version of a
Single Customer View and this
could take anywhere between one
and three months, provided the
right people are involved and the
executive sponsorship is in place.
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This process model is what Neopost
Customer Information Management refer
to as the 3x3x3 model
• 3 days to plan a workshop
• 3 weeks to develop a POC
• 3 months to deliver and implement
Phase 1 of SCV
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
Step 1: Determine your goal in
three days
Let’s assume that the business has
reached broad agreement on the
business challenges for discussion in an
initial workshop. Now we need to find
out what information is needed to
successfully overcome that challenge
and allow your employees to do their
job. To be able to give effective
customer service to your existing
customer your employees need to have
all relevant and up-to-date information
at hand. This sounds straight-forward,
but isn’t always the case because:
• Who has the relevant information and
can it be accessed easily?
• What information is needed to provide
effective customer service?
• Can the information be acquired and
made available?
Step 2: Determine


feasibility in three weeks
The aim of the last question above
is to determine if the information
required actually exists in the
organisation and if so, can it be
acquired economically and with
m i n ima l d i s r up t i o n t o t h e
business?
Considering this, an organisation must
continuously revisit its goals, the
elements required to achieve it and the
ongoing contribution by the project
team. Neopost Customer Information
Management experience has shown that
by working together this step can be
achieved within three weeks.
Step 3: Your first single
customer view in three months
Having defined the initial project for
realising a single customer view and
understood the value to be gained from
such a solution, it’s time to get to work.
The preparation work required has the
following elements:
• Organise the basic customer data
• Maintaining the data by realising batch
and real-time/point-of-entry integration
with the main data sources, thus
enabling your Single Customer View to
be aligned with updates and changes in
the underlying source systems.
• Make this data available through a hub
(such as a portal) to facilitate the
Single Customer View.
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
Organising the basic customer
data
To trust the data in your Single
Customer View, you’ll have to ensure
the customer data is reliable enough
to work with, Neopost Customer
Information Management define
‘reliable’ using our ACCU principle:
• Accurate: Ensure your data is up to
date. Examples include addresses
that no longer exist, companies that
have gone out of business and
people who have moved or passed
away.
• Complete: Do you have all the
contact elements necessary for your
purpose? Depending on your goal,
you may need more or l ess
i n f o rma t i o n . An e xamp l e i s
determining a person’s gender
w h i c h c a n o f t e n b e d o n e
automatically based on their first or
last name.
• Correct: Is the data in your source
systems correct? For example,
properly structured and formatted
postal codes, an e-mail address with
the ‘@’ symbol and content in the
last-name field?
• Unique: Is every customer only
listed once? Depending on your
definition of customer (a household,
individual, organisation) you should
seek to merge related records.
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Making your data accurate, complete
and correct usually involves two or three
steps:
1. Cleanse your data file by using
data quality software
2. Automated de-duplication and
conso l i da t i on i n to a s ing le
customer record
3. Au t oma t ed en r i c hmen t v i a
external sources if required
C l e a n s i n g : t h i s c a n b e d o n e
automatically. Good data cleansing
software incorporates knowledge of the
s t ruc tu re o f addresses , names ,
telephone numbers and other customer
related information. The software also
simulates human reasoning based on
knowledge. When you see ‘Mr. Julia
Smiht’, you know that it should be ‘Ms.
Julia Smith’. These are the kinds of
problems you want to remove from your
customer data, preferably with as little
effort as possible.
Consolidation: Seeing as it is often
simpler for your employees to add a
customer, or even a file full of prospects
– a second time, instead of finding out
whether someone is already registered,
the number of duplicate customer
entries at many organisations increases
by 20% each year, additionally customer
data can degrade in accuracy by up to
30% annually; thus making a single
customer view impossible. For this you
need an automated solution, which still
requires that ‘Smiht’ and ‘Smith’ are put
together.

 
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
Enriching: A great deal of information
can be purchased in the UK, and you
may be required to perform certain
validation tasks. For instance, you may
have to check a telephone number is
listed on the ‘Telephone Preference
Service’. By using a process similar to
your data consolidation task, you can
link the purchased information to what
you already have and automatically
enrich that data. The purchased
information can vary from Credit Scoring
information, telephone numbers, post-
codes, etc.
Maintaining the data:
integration with source
systems
This part of the preparation of your
Single Customer View solution can be as
extensive and involved as you need it to
be. The objective of this is to satisfy the
needs of your customers. This step will
require the business to consider the
following issues:
• Do we want changed data to be
automatically sent to the source
systems? The advantage of this is
that your customer data in multiple
systems is properly maintained, but
it may require some investment
depending on the interoperability of
the source systems.
• Do we want to make the Single
Customer View available locally, or
across the enterprise via a SaaS
option, or inclusion on mobile devices?
The choice here is to either pay for
everything or make decisions based on
how users will access the data.
• Should employees have a complete and
up-to-date view of their customer
immediately, or is a maximum delay of
24 hours permissible? In other words
do we process everything in real-time
or can certain information be processed
overnight?
As long as the project remains focused
on the initial objective and the intended
result is deemed to provide essential
value to the business you have many
options.
The Neopost Customer
Information Management approach to
Single Customer View is achieved
through incremental project deliverables.
Making the data available in a
central location
The previous steps are all about the
preparation. Whether you chose to make
your CRM solution the central part of the
system or establish a Customer Data
Hub, it must serve the needs of your
customers and your employees. Make
sure that the data is a complete set of
information on your customers, available
anytime, anywhere.
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View
About Human Inference, by
Neopost


Human Inference, acquired by Neopost in
2012, has been helping governments and
businesses to improve their customer
relationships for over 25 years, by
resolving all their customer data and
information quality concerns.
This means that:
• the Belastingdienst [Dutch Tax and
Customs Administration] can enter your
correct information in advance
• Center Parcs c an send you a
personalized offer, resulting in a 20%
higher return on their marketing efforts
• ING was able to merge seamlessly with
Postbank
• Nutricia realised the basis for even
more successful marketing campaigns in
just three months
• A n d A e g o n , I N G L e a s e , S N S
Property Finance and many others
prevent millions of euros in fraud every
quarter

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More information
If you would like to find out more about the
value of a single customer view for your
organisation, or you are looking for tips and
advice, please feel free to contact
Neopost Customer Information Management:


T: +44 (0)20 7831 3900


E: UKCIM.sales@neopost.com


You can also learn more about our solutions
and customer success stories by visiting us
online:
W: cim.neopost.co.uk
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Copyright  ©  Human  Inference,  2013  All  rights  reserved.  This  
whitepaper  has  been  wriHen  with  the  greatest  care.  However,  Human  
Inference  cannot  be  held  responsible  for  any  consequences  in  case  (a  
part  of  the)  content  is  incomplete  or  incorrect.  
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Whitepaper: Achieving your Single Customer View

 
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