The concept of putting the customer at the heart of your business is anything but new. Retailers have been building their businesses around customer behaviour since the concept of a ‘customer’ was born. However, in today’s environment of new technology, increasing consumer choice and declining customer loyalty, understanding what the customer wants has become perhaps the biggest challenge for businesses. With the speed of change only likely to get faster and customer demands ever increasing how can retailers get the information they need to put themselves on the front foot?
Single Customer View (SCV) has been a buzzword in marketing for several years now but while pulling customer data together to give us a central view of each customer is clearly a step in the right direction, is having SCV enough in today’s ever changing world?
Whether it’s SCV, social CRM, a multi-channel strategy or an omni-channel strategy, what most companies really need is the time and the space to be able to take a step back and understand where they are, where the threats are coming from, what the opportunities look like and what can they learn from the mistakes that were made in the past – both by themselves and others. All of this relies on data and being able to understand what it is telling you and how different pieces relate to each other. The biggest challenge for retailers looking for competitive advantage is being able to extract the kind of insights from their data that can help them plot the right path for their business moving forwards whilst better targeting and building relationships with their customers.
These days everyone is clear on the value of information but there is a big difference between theory and reality. Many retailers still view data in silos, relying on analysts to pull together disparate information streams and see how sets of statistics relate to each other. As the data streams evolve, making sense of them becomes more and more complex. Although data is probably the most valuable thing a company owns it is often the most contentious and issues around internal ownership, integration and resource are often the biggest barriers to retailers being able to identify and respond to opportunities in front of them. Addressing these issues is as important as the systems you have around the data itself. This is even more important as companies move towards the concept of the Customer Information Hub (CIH).
Customer facing organisations and retailers in particular should look to move towards a Customer Information Hub (CIH) to overcome data challenges and better target and build relationships with customers. Retailers must look to address these issues and move one step further on from a Single Customer View (SCV). While SCV focuses on pulling together data on a single customer, CIH looks to extend that to all information relevant to that individual. This could include product information, data from the supply chain and marketing. Being able to pull this data together and underpinning it with the right analytical tools then puts the retailer in a position to automate analysis of customer data along with the possibility of a system that suggests the best way to respond to that data.
Moving on from SCV towards a CIH will enable businesses to provide customers with the same high quality service across any channel, as well as better targeted marketing campaigns and in the longer term help them to plot the right strategy for the future.
By Martin Philpott, Head of Retail at IMGROUP.
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