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The Ultimate Guide to
Single Customer View
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Contents
1. Introduction
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2. What is a 'true' SCV?
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2.1 What is the difference between a data warehouse and an SCV?
2.2 Data governance and preparation
3. What are the benefits of an SCV?
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3.1 Better data = Better marketing
4. How do you measure the ROI of an SCV?
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5. Key considerations before building a Single Customer View
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5.1 How do I get the business to commit?
5.2 Do I want a fixed price or agile development?
5.3 I work in the B2B market – who is my ‘customer’?
6. What are you buying when you invest in an SCV?
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7. Conclusion
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1. Introduction
When approaching the subject of a Single Customer View (SCV), you’re going
to encounter a wide range of views.
In 2016, Technology for Marketing asked its Board of Experts their thoughts
on SCVs and the responses ranged from “mythical beast formed by hype” to
“the holy grail for customer relationship management”.
Clearly, there are many opinions – and more than a few misconceptions –
about a Single Customer View. So it’s understandable that businesses looking
to optimize their marketing strategies have reservations about what an SCV
can achieve – if they believe such a thing exists at all.
This eBook aims to provide you with all the information you need to take the
necessary steps towards understanding and implementing “the holy grail” of
an SCV, successfully, at your organization.
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2. What is a ‘true’ SCV?
Let’s start by demystifying the belief that an SCV is a “mythical beast”. It isn’t –
but it’s not easy! Many have tried to achieve an SCV and failed, but many have
succeeded and seen hugely positive returns as a result.
There are many perspectives on what a Single Customer View is (and isn’t),
one of the most common misconceptions being the notion that an SCV is
either a piece of software or an off-the-shelf product.
The Single Customer View is not a product but is in fact a process that your
data must follow to make it ready and suitable for marketing, analytics and
insight.
Through the extraction, transformation and load process, the SCV should take
all the data you hold about your customers on an automated journey of
matching, cleansing and enhancement.
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The Single Customer View sits at the heart of your marketing efforts, storing,
processing and manipulating data from multiple sources.
It presents this data in a structured, clean database with a single record for
each customer and with each record enhanced by linking other pieces of
information, perhaps from 3rd party sources, to drive intelligence and insight.
The SCV can include details about premises, contact channel information,
campaign contact history, transactions and every online and offline
touchpoint the customer has had with your products or services.
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2.1 What is the difference between a
data warehouse and an SCV?
A Single Customer View is a database that aggregates data from
different streams, which means it is easily confused with other
data integration projects, such as a Data Warehouse.
However, while a Data Warehouse also collects high volumes of
structured and unstructured data, it does not necessarily need to
match to a customer and will not go through the necessary
cleansing and enhancement process that is so key to the SCV.
The Data Warehouse could be as relevant to any department of an
organization as it is for marketing.
In fact, the relevance for marketing is often questionable when
attempting to use data mining tools to quickly extract ‘actionable’
customer data from a Data Warehouse.
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Marketers are highly iterative human beings and, to be successful, need to
have the ability to ask many questions and interrogate their data in real-time.
Whereas a project to build a Single Customer View is for marketers, the Data
Warehouse is normally an IT project.
Although both have obvious benefits, the benefit to the marketer of a Data
Warehouse is actually very small. Why? Because the main goal for marketing is
to have direct access to their data to enable decisions to made quickly and to
turn those decisions into marketing campaigns at speed.
Putting in requests to an IT department for a query, selection or piece of
analysis from a Data Warehouse not only takes time but means an over-
reliance on other departments to drive the success of the marketing team.
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2.2 Data governance and preparation
The correct governance and preparation is vital for a Single Customer View
and some of the data you collect may not be suitable for marketing purposes.
When building a true SCV, the following will need considering:
Legality: For any piece of data, marketers will need to ask themselves the
question “am I legally able to use this data?” For example, sensitive data such
as credit card details require PCI compliance for storage of that data, and
when trading internationally you need to be aware of laws across country
borders, states and territories.
Trustworthiness: When compiling all your data sources, you’ll find that some
will be more trustworthy than others. For example, an email a customer
provides for a receipt or travel itinerary is far more likely to be correct than a
hastily scribbled address on a feedback form handed out to weary plane
passengers returning on a long-haul flight.
Decay: How long data stays relevant is another important factor. Addresses
and contact numbers can go out of date, while job titles and names can
change often. Enhancing an existing database with third party data to ensure
time sensitive information is as up-to-date and trustworthy as possible.
Marketing ready: For data to be truly useful to marketing departments, it
needs to offer perspective about people, rather than product codes, events or
transactions. Do you want to use your data to tell stories or listen to what
consumers have to say?
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3. What are the benefits of an SCV?
Armed with the knowledge of what a Single Customer view is, it’s then
important to establish what an SCV can do.
The SCV is positioned central to your marketing solution and continually flows
in new data from campaign results.
The Single Customer View is fundamental and I
don’t know how you can run a business without
one. With big data taking hold, the SCV is a must-
have to allow traditional marketing best practice.
Stacie Maxey, Director of database marketing
Domestic & General
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The Single Customer View isn’t the end result for marketers – it creates the
rules and processing that drives what will become the end result.
An SCV is responsible for several functions:
1. To extract, transform and load data
from various sources and prepare in a
standardized format. For example, if your
organization collects transactional data in
multiple currencies then it is the
responsibility for the SCV to ensure a
consistent currency can be viewed for
comparing ‘apples with apples’.
2. To remove inaccuracies and cleanse the data
to provide you with the most trustworthy insights
which, in turn, allow you to make the best and
most well informed marketing decisions.
3. To merge duplicate customer
information from different silos,
centralising data from online and
offline channels to provide a
refined, comprehensive view of
each customer.
4. To combine with marketing
technologies to easily visualize
and analyze data at speed to
identify the perfect target
audience.
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3.1 Better Data = Better Marketing
Poor quality data contains numerous errors that can devastate the success of
a marketing campaign. Inaccurate names, addresses and contact details,
along with duplicate records and decayed information, will distort your view of
a customer. This will make your campaigns less effective, less efficient and
lead to displeasure from your customers. Nobody likes to receive irrelevant
messages and mailings, least of all multiple times.
For example, can you tell if the dozen or so ‘James Kelly’ entries you have in
your database are the same person? Are your customers still receiving emails
addressed to ‘FirstName’? Are you wasting unnecessary money posting the
same promotions through a single letterbox?
As a Single Customer View provides an organization with an accurate, fully
formed record of their customers and prospects, this means trustworthy data
to form the foundation of your 1-to-1 marketing efforts.
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From this base, analytics tools will
allow you to ask questions of your
database in order to achieve your
ultimate marketing goals:
Better segmentation of your
customer base: Clustering groups
through any combination of
demographic, geographic,
transactional and behavioral data will
allow you to target the right customers
with products and services that are
more relevant to their needs and
wants.
This will lead to higher conversion
rates, encourage retention and long-
term revenue from existing customers
and add increasingly useful additional
data for future campaigns.
To make campaigns more
personalized: If your database is filled
with inaccuracies, it will severely
undermine any effective attempts at
personalization and speaking to your
customers as individuals.
Using a correct name will get your
promotion off on the right foot, while
linking the right customer to the
correct transactional history allows for
relevant recommendation messages
and targeted advertising.
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4. How do you measure the ROI of an SCV?
Creating a Single Customer View to merge data that is likely spread across
several departmental and cloud silos (including point-of-sale systems, e-
commerce, email service providers and more) is a significant undertaking. So,
justifying the ROI of a Single Customer View is important.
In addition to some of the more obvious advantages (mentioned earlier) the
ROI can be justified with other benefits, such as:
Better targeting your most profitable customers: With the ability to
pinpoint specific customer segments, an SCV can highlight the customers that
are the most valuable to you. Concentrating your marketing efforts on this
group is not only a more efficient way to optimize marketing budgets, you’ll
develop a greater understanding of cross- and up-sell opportunities too.
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Fewer costly mistakes: By consolidating data from
multiple silos, you decrease the likelihood of making errors
that can affect your budget – and your reputation.
Sending duplicate irrelevant messages leads to dissatisfied
and disinterested customers, while your marketing tactics
will suffer with poor engagement.
Happier, loyal customers: Customers who view your brand
as better suited to their needs are more likely to encourage
further communications from you, sign up to loyalty
schemes and view your organization positively.
Customers with high regard for your brand are more likely
to buy and return to purchase again.
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Better attribute sales to marketing campaigns: Through the blending of
online and offline data you can better attribute sales to marketing efforts to
prove ROI.
The SCV creates a complete memory of every single customer to improve your
attribution models and always understand where customers are in their
journey.
To comply with data use laws: In 2016, the Information Commissioner’s
Office (ICO) revealed the guidelines for the General Data Protection Regulation
(GDPR), a new set of laws for the collecting, sharing and storing of personal
data.
These will come into force in mid-2018 and could have a considerable impact
on any data-driven organization…
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Key to the new GDPR guidelines are rules relating to:
• Correcting inaccurate records you may have shared with third parties
• Consumer rights to access the information you hold about them
• Your legal basis for processing personal data
• Consent to collect, retain and use personal data
• Procedures for detecting, reporting and investigating a personal data breach
While applicable to countries within the European Union, any business that
hopes to trade with EU countries (and collect data from EU citizens) will still need
to conform to these data protection laws.
An SCV that contains cleansed, legal, accurate information is a great step towards
being complicit and mitigating some of the risk of breaching these new
regulations.
And when the maximum fine has been set at either €20million or up to 4%
of an organization’s global turnover (whichever is the biggest), the ROI is
hugely impacted by the implicit risk of not having an SCV.
GDPR
General Data
Protection Regulation
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5. Key considerations before building a Single Customer View
How do I get hold of the data sources?
As different teams and third parties own it, getting hold of the source data is
a challenge that will require company-wide coordination.
Once IT has ascertained the existence of different data sources, it will
typically take up to four weeks for the IT department to provide the required
data feeds.
What essential data should I use?
It’s important to be realistic about the volume of data fed into the SCV
database and how much will be relevant to the customer journey. Trying to
include every piece of customer data, including social media and website
data, has the potential for problems.
You should also consider whether or not real-time data is going to add
enough value to justify the challenge associated with building and
maintaining real-time feeds from key operational systems to the SCV.
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Customer name and address – including identifiable details, such as email or
mobile phone number. Think about the uniqueness (or not) of every field –
some families or couples share email addresses, for example.
Transactional data – For spotting trends and patterns in purchasing history,
cross-sell and up-sell success.
Communication history – closing the loop with customer response to
communications, including email click through, open times or SMS response,
to inform future campaigns.
Geodemographic – age bands, affluence and lifestyle information adds
richness to the customer data and improves the quality of segmentation.
Suppression information – opt-in and opt-out lists (for example, the Mailing
Preference Service and bereavement register.)
Some essential data sources to include in your SCV:
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5.1 How do I get the business to commit?
A Single Customer View will also require input from sales, finance and
operations as well as marketing, and these departments will have
different requirements.
Although these requirements will add complexity to the SCV build, the
sharing of cross department data to achieve a holistic view is vital for
accurate matching, enhancement and suppression of data.
Understanding the database from the perspective of each business
department is essential, so make it clear upfront both in terms of the
ownership and purpose of an SCV.
An SCV project could require an entire Marketing Transformation of
data, technology, people, processes and business culture. Click here
for more about undertaking a Marketing Transformation.
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5.2 Do I want a fixed price or agile
development?
Fixed price, fixed timeline projects offer
reassurance to organizations that like to agree to
everything upfront.
However, the process of delving through customer
data is often a voyage of discovery that opens up
unexpected opportunities – an agile development
model allows the SCV developer to respond far
more flexibly.
In practice, the reality is that organizations actually
want the best of both worlds – fixed price, fixed
timeline, but with the flexibility to adapt.
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5.3 I work in the B2B market – who is my ‘customer’?
Unlike the consumer market, where it is comparably straightforward
to define a customer, the same cannot always be said in the
Business-to-Business market.
For example, is a customer the business or an individual within the
business? Or is it the finance director that signs off the order?
Establishing your main point of contact and their job title (or multiple
points of contact) is critical before embarking on the SCV
development.
You need to be able to connect contacts to a company record and
then roll up that company record to a parent company, link multi-
nationals and then maintain a database that is certain to decay in
data quality by 40% every 12 months.
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6. What are you buying when you invest in
a Single Customer View?
Achieving a true Single Customer View can be an expensive project, and while
most understand that an SCV investment will deliver an accurate database,
few realize that ownership of the complex algorithms, rules and data
processes to create it often stop the moment a contract ends.
If a decision is made to move to another data partner later down the line, in
most cases you will be handed back all your data in all its pre-cleansed state
and with no ownership of the data structure or schema – placing you back at
square one.
As shown in the illustration your business, typically, owns the raw data
sources. Although that will never change, every routine, algorithm, model and
process that transforms your data into the Single Customer View are often
owned by the agency. Any third party data sources that are licensed and
blended to your data, using the load and matching routines, are also at risk.
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When obtaining sign-off from your company for an SCV development, you’ll
need to determine who owns the IP in order to be sure of the risk involved in
the purchase.
Failure to secure the IP up-front could drastically undermine the overall value
of both the SCV and the business.
A far more desirable option to de-risk the SCV investment is a model where
the IP ownership is handed over to you. This means that, if problems arise
during the contract (such as technical issues, changes in corporate policy or
funding constraints), there’s no fear that the entire investment could be
wasted.
A good, clean and marketable database is now a very positive asset for any
business and with the IP in hand, as demonstrated in the illustration to the
left, a company has a tangible business asset in the SCV and the flexibility to
make the best decision about the next stage in data evolution once the
contract comes to an end.
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7. Conclusion
Marketing has evolved considerably over the last few decades but the mission has remained the
same: to build better relationships with customers and encourage them to spend more with you.
With these customers now spread across the globe, interacting 24/7 on a wide variety of devices, a
Single Customer View is critical to identify, understand and communicate with them.
Building an SCV can be costly, and cause consternation for organizations with entrenched legacy
systems, but with so many businesses becoming increasingly data-driven, taking control of that
data, analysing it and putting it to good use has become a necessity.
As we have found time-and-again, the investment in an SCV is quickly justified, highlighting your
most profitable customers, new revenue and cost saving opportunities. Is an SCV a mythical beast?
No, it has already been proven as a solution for more efficient, effective and targeted marketing.
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UBM
Global events and media company UBM EMEA built a Single Customer View that
updated daily to support the company’s data insight and marketing activity.
UBM’s SCV pulls in multiple data feeds from its internal systems and from
suppliers. This includes events registration data, newsletter signups, ticket
buyers, conference delegates, magazine subscribers and the sales database.
Whereas in the past, segmenting customers was limited, costly and time-
consuming, UBM’s Single Customer View allows its marketers to easily create
customer selections and automate its email communications to send relevant,
targeted messages to event registrants.
“The SCV database has provided us with the
chance to get to know our own data and put
us in a position where we understand what
we need for the future.”
Head of Data at UBM EMEA
Case Study
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Liverpool Victoria (LV=) is one of the UK’s largest insurance
companies. The organization needed an SCV to clean and
consolidate its customer data to ensure greater accuracy for
renewal dates, product holdings, suppressions and
communication history.
The combination of an SCV and marketing analytics tools
enabled LV= to improve its targeting and segmentation
capabilities. The company reported campaign response rates
improving by 39% and campaign volumes increasing by 15%.
“With the Single Customer View and
analysis tools we’re able to concentrate
on observation and strategy rather than
fighting fires and spending time
manually fixing known issues.”
Stacie Maxey, Analytics Manager at LV=
Liverpool Victoria
Case Study
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