How many times have you heard that marketers need a “single view of the customer”? A Google search on the term turns up 46 million links including:
“You and everyone else in your organization want to know everything possible about your customers. You want a single view of the customer that everyone across the enterprise can use. There’s nothing new about this. Businesses have been trying to get a single view of their customers and prospects for years.” Informatica
“Bausch & Lomb realized that without a single view of its customer, its goal to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty would be difficult to attain.” CRMAdvocate
“Most companies know what a single view of the customer is and its value in a multichannel retail operation.” DMNews
My take: Truth is, most companies don’t know what a single view of the customer is, and many place way too much value in the concept.
And the Bausch & Lomb comment is perplexing. Which customers are they talking about? Customers like me who buy their solution? Why in the world do they need a single view of me to drive satisfaction and loyalty? Or customers like Wal-Mart? What does a “single view of the customer” mean in that context? If B&L wants to drive satisfaction and loyalty, it might want to start by making products that don’t cause eye fungus.
The need for a single view of the customer is a myth that, while well-intentioned, is really quite a silly goal and concept. Here’s why:
- The need for customer data is function or task dependent. The statement that “everyone wants to know everything possible about your customers” is ridiculous. Whether it’s a cross-sell offer being made, or a service request being executed, there’s a subset of all potentially available customer data that is relevant to that particular interaction. Having a single view of the customer not only doesn’t facilitate that interaction, it potentially makes it more difficult. Why? Because it forces employees to navigate through the customer data to figure out what’s there and what’s relevant. Yes, business rules can be developed to provide guidelines, but that’s a lot easier said than done.
- Creating a single view of the customer potentially subordinates important business issues. Focusing efforts on integrating all sources of customer data potentially ignores important business-oriented questions like: 1) which data elements are most important to a particular task? 2) what customer data elements don’t we have that would be valuable? and 3) can we use existing data elements as proxies for or to predict the elements we don’t have?
- A single view of the customer is a blatant violation of privacy. Personally, I see no reason why the teller in my bank branch needs to know that I recently applied for a loan. Or worse, to see any of the details of that loan application. Oh sure, once again, business rules can be set and applied to control who sees what data. But this is asking for trouble. If you think the rules can’t be skirted, then don’t talk to anyone at Societe Generale.
It’s important, however, to distinguish between the notion of a “single view of the customer” and customer data integration (CDI). To me, the objective of CDI is to establish a single, logical instance of a customer with a consistent identifier for that customer that links internal and external data sources.
Unfortunately, too many firms ignore this aspect, and focus instead on integrating their existing, internal data stores. But for many firms, it’s the integration of external sources of data with internal customer data that holds the key to getting a more comprehensive picture of their customers.
But as long as these firms obsess over having a single view of the customer — or worse, that potentially perverted 360 degree view of a customer (it makes me think they’re looking at my butt) — the business goals they’re really trying to achieve will remain beyond their grasp.
Technorati Tags: Marketing, Customer Data Integration
I think firms should aspire to get the “single view” or “360 degree view of the customer,” but not in such a literal or “individual” sense (ie, in the DM News post you link to where the author suggests that retail cash-register clerks should tap into customer databases to make additional product recommendations based on what individuals purchased online).
Today’s obsession with “CDI” and supercalamicrotargeting too often ends up interfering with marketers abilities to create great customer experiences. Conducting a simple 30,000 foot view audit of one’s own customer experience and the typical experiences of other personas when interacting with marketers’ brand across multiple channels can yield powerful, actionable insights much easier, quicker and more effectively.
For most companies, the key to creating a great customer experience based on “the single view of the customer” won’t be about propositioning customers in one channel based on what the computer tells them about their behavior in another — it will be more about bringing good old fashioned oversight and governance back into increasingly fragmented marketing organizaitons to ensure that a customer isn’t getting hit with an email by a brand’s credit card division the same minute that its home loan and brokerage units do.
Bausch & Lomb… “single view…” Oh the irony.
When searching a phrase or “term” in Google, you need to use quotes.
When performing Ron’s search like this…
Google: “single view of the customer”
…you only get 138,000 results. This is the number of pages containing the exact, full citation “single view of the customer,” not all pages containing all/most of those words somewhere on the page.
The point’s the same either way. Just fyi.
Interesting take on the subject. It seems that what’s missing is a definition of “single view of the customer”: as far as i can tell this usually means that there is only one data source in a company that stores information about customers. This way I don’t get asked 3 times my name and account number every time my call gets transferred from department to department or that i get conflicting offers from different departments. You seem to be confusing this with “comprehensive view of the customer”. The two are not the same.
On the latter topic, I think that discussion should center around how much is enough, and not so much about whether it is good or bad.
Ron – I know where you’re going with this and I think there’s a “happy medium” available. As I’m sure you know, far too many FIs have customer information in multiple siloes and do not do a very good job, if they do any at all, of consolidating that information INTO A USABLE FORMAT. I’m not a fan of information just for the sake of information. Having said that, it sure would be nice if I’m talking to a contact center rep at my bank and they already know that I have my trust services with the bank and what my credit card balance is and that I had this same discussion last week with my local branch manager. There is such a disconnect between the different hands not having any idea what else is going on that it’s hard to believe they really know what they’re doing. A lot of banks will say “oh, that’s in trust services – that’s different from us” – not to the customer it isn’t.
Ron,
I think the position you’re coming at this from is from an person/agent’s point of view, and like you say, there is no need for a CSR to have every data item that is necessary.
The way I, and I think most of the vendors who do master data management – think of ‘single view of the customer’ is from the organisation’s point of view, so that the all the data is integrated – CDI being one of those techniques. Data deduplication is another – where even within the same system, there are duplicates for the same customer. It happens, so many times…
When it comes to the front line CSRs, it’s not a single view of the customer that is required but the information to provide an appropriate response to the particular customer in front of them, which aligns with corporate/product line strategy. So customer X gets an upgrade offer and customer Y is not given anything.
To get to this offer we need the analytics – at the right time for the agent interating with the customer – to be already built based on external (ratings agencies etc), and internal – our knowledge of this individual and their recency, frequency, intensity and whatever other metrics and segmentation are required.
However, getting these right are dependent on getting a single view of the customer!
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Good point on CDI versus 360 degree view, on the Marketing side it’s probably semantics but on the IT side it’s not. These 2 groups need to speaketh the same language when we get going down these paths…
In my experience, you get closer to the truth on these issues if you peel a few layers back. Typically, you find a conversation that goes something like this:
IT: So, the C-Level wants us to integrate our customer data. Found out it’s important at a conference or something…
Marketing: Yea, it will be good for CRM and all that!
IT: So, what we are going to need from you folks are the “requirements”.
Marketing: Requirements?
IT: Yes, you know, what is it you need to be done? First, how would you define “integration”? Second, what data, from which systems, do you want to be integrated?
Marketing: Don’t you know?
IT: No, we just build the systems, we do exactly what you want us to do (Note: this is a “new era” IT person, obviously)
Marketing: Well, how would we figure that out?
IT: Umm, Ahhh, what are you going to *do* with the data once it’s integrated? Maybe that would help answer the question?
Marketing: Hmmm, not sure, really. Use it for CRM, you know. Build a relationship with the customer. Stuff like that.
IT: Ok, what kind of data from which systems do you need to build a relationship?
Marketing: I’m not sure. Can we get all the data integrated? Then we can decide later what data we really need.
IT: Well, that’s going to be a huge, complex project. It would really be easier and faster if you could tell us what you need.
Marketing: We need it all. Yes, I’m convinced of that. We need all the data, all the time. And while you’re at it, we need it in real time!
IT: Real time? That will be very expensive. Are you going to take action on the data in real time? Because if you’re not, then I’m not sure why the data would have to be…
Marketing: Yes! In Real time! Are you forgetting Social Media? We need a complete view of everything the customer has ever done, everywhere, in Real Time!
And thus, the 360 degree view is born.
Despite the fact it is largely irrelevant.
The question that needs to be answered is what are you going to do with this data? And most Marketing folks simply have no idea. They speak GRP, not individual person.
They need a plan for organizing and acting on the data first.
I agree with several of these comments – the “one view of the customer” as I see it is to have sufficient data available to uniquely identify me and the products and services that I have purchased from you -
As an example, from my own writing here on wordpress:
“I use a larger Canadian services organization for a raft of products that include wireless services, voice services, data services, Wide Area Network (WAN) security and managed services, and even data center hosting services.
I still have one problem though, every one of those services is a different contract with a different division, with different contact number and email address. None of those services “knows” me as a customer of the other services.”
Elliot Ross
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