Knowing who exactly your customers are, what they need and when they need it ensures the business can better serve them. A single view of the customer (SVOC) helps create this kind of clarity by providing organisations with real-time access to data from across all systems in order to get a holistic view of customer behaviour. By using SVOC as part of their overall customer experience strategy, business leaders can better understand the needs and wants of their audience, increase customer loyalty, and maximise ROI.
Below we’ll explore what exactly a single view of customer is and how it benefits businesses—providing actionable information and advice with which you can begin to envision how your business can achieve its goals using SVOC.
What Is Single View And How Does It Work?
Single view of customer is an approach that enables businesses to create a holistic profile of an individual customer. Data from multiple disparate sources such as sales orders, marketing activities, customer service interactions, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, marketing database and transactional databases, etc are all collected and consolidated into a Customer Data profile (CDP) platform to create a single view of the customer.
This means having the ability to integrate all available customer data across departments, channels, and touchpoints for entire journeys along the customer life cycle. This in turn requires interconnectivity between different systems and software to draw a comprehensive picture of customer activity.
This includes assembling data from traditional CRMs, web analytics packages, marketing automation tools, social media sites, enterprise applications and more to unite customers’ experiences across multiple touchpoints into a single view. To create such a single source of truth, every system and application capturing customer data must be streamlined together in terms of formatting and structure as well as continuously updated with new customer data as it becomes available.
Essentially, organizations need to deploy a composable architecture that supports distributed computing via synchronized microservices or APIs. The thought process behind this is to create an ecosystem where all components store the same information but still remain decentralized – ultimately creating a single view of the customer anywhere at any given time.
With this, organizations can develop insights that lead to meaningful interactions with customers focused on their individual needs and preferences. With these systems in place, businesses can have better relationships with current customers and more effectively target new ones. SVOC helps companies generate an accurate portrayal of the wants and habits of their customers for a dependable picture to use in developing strategies and creating personalized experiences that are better tailored to their customer’s needs.
