What is single customer view and why do you need it?
What is a single customer view (SCV)?
A single customer view means you store all of your customers’ data in a single platform or database. You can browse through your customers, click on one and view their entire interaction history with your business.
Many tools that offer a single view of the customer — which is also called a 360-degree customer view — sync data from multiple sources of internal first-party data and third-party data. These sources may include the following:
website analytics
in-store sales purchases
social media channels
email marketing
direct customer interactions with sales or customer support.
In many cases, customer relationship management (CRM) tools or customer data platforms (CDPs) offer a single customer view.
What information does a single customer view include?
Contact information
A customer’s contact information is essential to relationship building. Contact information will often include:
name
address
phone number
email address
business name and address (if relevant)
social media profiles.
Demographics
Most single view customer tools store demographic data. You can use this information for segmentation purposes so that you can send the right offers to the right users.
Demographic data may include the following:
age
gender
education level
marital status
income level
employment status
job role
industry
size of the business.
Business-to-consumer brands are more likely to track personal demographic data — like age, income level and marital status — while business-to-business brands are more likely to focus on the firmographic data of the business itself, such as industry, number of employees and annual revenue.
Customer support interactions
Customer support interactions include any engagement between the customer and your support team. If customers need help troubleshooting with your SaaS application, for example, you can track the entire interaction with your CRM software, including their concern and how your team resolved it:.
Customer support interactions may include the following:
date of contact
method(s) of contact
number of tickets, calls or messages
duration of the customer concern
names of involved team members
solutions your team proposed
customer outcomes
whether your team resolved the issue.
Sales team touch points
Sales team touch points include all customer interactions with a sales team, both before and during the actual sales process. Monitoring touch points can provide insight into how customers are finding you, what’s driving them to take action, and how they feel about your brand.
Sales touch points may include:
social media
online ads
marketing content
company events
peer referrals or affiliate programs
conversations with company representatives
product reviews
point of sale
thank you letters and follow-ups
upselling or cross-selling emails
customer onboarding
Transactions and purchases
Single customer views should always include details about both online and offline purchase history, such as:
order or subscription value
purchase dates
product abandonment or churn
returns or cancellations.
Consent preferences
Consent preferences record the data processing and tracking individual users opted-in or out of. Australian privacy laws require an individual’s consent for the collection, use or disclosure of their personal information.
Behavioural data
Behavioural data includes user actions and their interactions with your business. It may include:
the pages customers viewed
outreach to your sales team
items customers added to their cart
email opens
purchases.
Why do businesses need a single view of the customer?
Better decision-making
A single customer view provides all the information you need about every contact in your database. Not only is this helpful for the sales team, but it also benefits many other functions in the company.
Your marketing function, for example, can focus on the audience segments that are most valuable. Customer support can resolve client issues faster when they have all the information they need to hand. Everyone benefits, including the customer.
Marketing personalisation
Personalisation in marketing can make a huge impact on the success of your campaigns.
A McKinsey study found that 71% of customers expected personalised communications or product suggestions. Another study from Econsultancy found that 80% of companies reported an uplift in sales after implementing personalisation in their marketing and sales strategies.
Effective personalisation is only possible when you’re working with accurate and up-to-date data. Relevant data will help you create strong offers — like 10% off an item they added to an abandoned cart.
The 360-degree customer view makes it possible to send the right messages at the right time across multiple different platforms, creating an effective omnichannel experience.
Customer segmentation
Customer segmentation is the practice of classifying your contacts into distinct audiences based on characteristics, actions, needs or pain points.
Single customer views allow you to segment users based on the following:
current stage of the customer lifecycle
location
activity patterns
purchases
interests
industry
company size
conversion data
persona
company role
activity time and date.
Remember that a single user may belong in multiple segments at once. A single customer view will ensure that your sales team is classifying each customer correctly at all points, so the customer journey is dynamic. You can also use segments to review customer analytic data and learn more about your contacts.
Customer lifetime value (CLV) insights
Customer lifetime value tells you how valuable your customers are throughout the duration of their relationship with your business. You can calculate CLV for individual customers, certain audience segments and your customer base overall.
A single customer view is essential to accurately assessing your customers’ CLV. And as you better identify which audience segments yield higher CLVs, you can optimise marketing and sales campaigns accordingly.
Cross-selling and upselling
As your sales team tracks what’s happening with each customer, they’ll identify opportunities for additional sales.
Cross-selling is the practice of selling other products or services to an existing client, and upselling is the practice of increasing the average order value by pitching higher-priced products or services. Both can significantly increase your CLV and your revenue.
Unified data
If you don’t have a single customer view, we’re willing to bet you’ve got a data silo problem.
When you aren’t syncing your customer data to a single location, you end up with an abundance of data only available in separate platforms. This makes it extremely difficult to get a complete understanding of what’s happening with each customer. As a result, you may miss important patterns or key buyer behaviours.
Tools that offer single customer views collect data from multiple sources, compiling that data into a single dashboard for easy review.
How do you create a single view of the customer?
Choose a platform
CDPs and CRMs typically offer a single customer view. They both collect and unify an organisation’s customer data from multiple sources, including transactional, behavioural and demographic data.
When choosing a platform, look for the following:
potential scalability
integrations with the software you’re already using
strong customer support.
MYOB CRM Tall Emu offers all of these features and more, giving you the full picture of every contact in your system.
Collect data
After you’ve chosen your CDP or CRM, it’s time to start collecting and syncing your data. Connect all essential data sources to your platform. Most tools offer integrations to help you get all your data in one place.
Resolve identities
Identity resolution is the practice of creating customer profiles and assigning data points to individual customers. Its purpose is to ensure data hygiene.
It’s important to remove duplicate contacts to prevent confusion. You can do this manually, though using an identity-matching system will be most effective. Check contacts against a single identifier like an email address, IP address, credit card number or phone number. Many customer data platforms or CRM systems offer this feature to prevent duplicate contacts.
Set up access controls
Finally, determine which team members need access to what data. Many companies don’t want everyone on the team to have data-editing permissions.
Most CDPs and CRMs have user management features that allow you to specify which team members get access to specific data and features.
MYOB’s Tall Emu has extensive user management options, including both pre-defined roles that come with different access levels and the ability to create your own unique roles. Administrators can adjust a user’s access at any point, should their role change for example.
Get a single view of the customer with MYOB
MYOB’s Tall Emu is a powerful whole of business CRM solution. Manage leads, sales and marketing activity, customer requests, inventory, delivery tracking and more, all in one place.
Tall Emu is a part of the MYOB business management platform. Designed around the six core workflows that any business will need to handle – customers, suppliers, employees, projects, finance, accounting and tax – MYOB allows you pay for what you need, but have the platform to grow your business with confidence.
With MYOB and Tall Emu, you can manage your customer relationships and sales orders effectively, while having the data insights to forecast demand and control stock, inventory, resourcing and cashflow requirements.
At MYOB, we have you covered.
Disclaimer: Information provided in this article is of a general nature and does not consider your personal situation. It does not constitute legal, financial, or other professional advice and should not be relied upon as a statement of law, policy or advice. You should consider whether this information is appropriate to your needs and, if necessary, seek independent advice. This information is only accurate at the time of publication. Although every effort has been made to verify the accuracy of the information contained on this webpage, MYOB disclaims, to the extent permitted by law, all liability for the information contained on this webpage or any loss or damage suffered by any person directly or indirectly through relying on this information.