Customer Single View is a 360-degree view of the customer, capturing their demographics, purchase behaviour, needs, preferences as well as motivations. Customers interact with brands in multiple ways across touchpoints. They could visit a store for purchase. They could also order online, could call up the call centre and make a complaint. Even post about their experience on social media. Their demographics are captured when they enrolled for the loyalty program. They would have shared their hobbies for a customer survey conducted. Since the interactions about them are stored in multiple databases, typically there is no unified knowledge about the customer.

Customer Single View is also the “single version of truth” about the customer.

The various kinds of data that are integrated in the single view are:

Customer Demographic Data: Demographic data that is usually captured while customers enrol for loyalty program or filling a new application form for a financial product. These include customer name, age and contact details.

Transactional & Service Data: These include purchase data across channels – online and offline. This data typically includes the product purchased, the price, discounts, if any, returns and so on. This will also answer questions like ‘How many times the product has been serviced?’, warranty, guarantee and so on.

Web and Behavioural Data: This includes the products browsed, the pages visited, time spent, clicks, hovers, scrolls and so on.

Complaints Data: This includes customer complaints made to the contact centres or through e-mails.

Engagement Data: This refers to how customers engage on the email campaigns, how many times they open emails, click on the links and so on.

Privacy and Consent data: This refers to getting customer’s consent for specific engagements and a for a specific time.

So why is the creation of a single view required? Consider this.

Consider Riya. While purchasing an insurance product for the first time, she gave her details as Riya Kumar (First name) and Aggarwal (Second Name). While purchasing for the second time, she gave the details as Riya (First Name) and Kr. Aggarwal (Second Name). Unless Riya reveals her first purchase details while purchasing the second time, she will be tagged as a new customer. This is one of the critical problems resolved by the customer single view. While integrating data from different systems, de-duplication and standardization of data is also done to identify the duplicates.

The single view has details about demographics, the purchase transactions as well as the interactions. It is not just about collecting the base information, the well created single view will have a lot of derived features that help marketers interact with the customer better. Some of the derived variables could be number of products purchased, revenue generated in last 1 year, number of complaints made in last 3 months and so on. As the brand understands the customer better through advanced data science, their Value Segment, their Behavioural Segment, their Propensity to Churn, Lifetime Value and so on can also be captured. All these customer attributes also become part of the single view.

A single view acts as a foundation for engagement. It will enable each customer in getting a seamless and consistent experience each time they interact with the brand. Customers use multiple channels to interact with brands, whichcan lead to complexities in attribution. A single view will help in understanding the interactions along the journey across devices and channels and help in better attribution models. Not only that, this can also be used to provide contextual recommendations based on where and how the customer is accessing information. This enables brands to provide personalised communication and reach the right customer in real time at the point of decision.

The single view also acts as a foundation for arriving at different customer segments and personas. These segments can be built using multiple facets as given below.

Building the single view is not a one-time activity. This is a continuous process of refining and updating the relevant information about the customer as they interact with the brand. A customer single view, if leveraged effectively, can lead to increased loyalty and better customer retention. It is important to reiterate that this is merely the first step in the journey, the foundation.