In this age of customer empowerment, delivering a great customer experience is expected. The conversation has moved on from the “Are you being served?” days of customer service: a one-off interaction, served with a smile if you’re lucky. A customer experience is immersive, engaging, and consistent throughout the entire purchase process, and continues long after the products are purchased. At its best, it inspires an emotional connection, a faithfulness between brand and customer.

Businesses have more communication channels available to them to achieve this connection than ever before. Marketers alone have over 40 different marketing channels to hand (Smart Insights). And this is before we’ve even touched on the vast amount of customer-related data held by a business.

This information and these communications channels can be used across a business to help drive customer engagement, improve retention, increase loyalty and ultimately, to generate sales – fantastic, in theory. But in practice, the plethora of channels and huge amount of data pose a huge challenge to businesses striving to maintain a competitive edge through their customer experience: how do they create and maintain a close, nurturing relationship with a customer when there are so many different communications channels and data sets?

As well as the huge diversity of communications channels, data, too is likely to be more of a hindrance than a help: research shows that 40% of businesses have more than 80% of their customer data stored in separate systems across their organisation.

The solution lies in the creation of the Single Customer View, which brings together insight gleaned from across the business and helps join the dots so the organisation can deliver targeted, engaging and relevant messages across an ecosystem of physical and digital channels.

The concept of the Single Customer View isn’t new. In post-war Europe grocers would keep a file of customers’ details, their groceries and any credit due. Pre-digital age, even the most rudimentary customer databases would include a section for noting any snippet of intelligence gathered from conversations (“Ask Mr Smith about his lumbago during next visit”), with the aim of making the customer feel valued. But now that multichannel and omnichannel are universal expressions, businesses need to cut through the noise generated even by their own organisation, to take customer engagement to the next level.

The need for a Single Customer View is important now than ever before due to:

  • Mobility: consumers expect a consistent online experience whether viewing a website on a smartphone, using the app or visiting the website on a desktop
  • Data: businesses are generating vast amounts of structured and unstructured data, and looking for ways to turn this data into a digital asset to add value to their business
  • Digital networks: not just used by consumers but now hugely important for businesses to engage with their customers
  • The post-austerity era: consumers are driving bargains, but businesses too need to decide where to grant incentives and creating a Single Customer View provides insight to achieve this
  • Regulation: some financial regulators in European countries are demanding a single customer view as a legal requirement. Under the UK’s Financial Services Compensation Scheme’s faster payout initiative, for example, deposit takers must provide the FSCS with a single customer view file with records of claimants within 72 hours of a request
  • Cloud computing: collaborative working across a business is easier to achieve with cloud-based platforms, more so than ever now the cost barriers have been removed due to the competitive cloud market
  • M&A environment: mergers and acquisitions require the convergence of complex legacy IT systems; businesses are using this as a chance to overhaul their systems to identify a Single Customer View

Creating a Single Customer View brings together information across an organisation to glean valuable, accurate insights, ultimately improving the customer experience. It can:

  • Reveal confident predictions of future buyer behaviour, enabling businesses to tightly target customers with specific products and services
  • Improve the accuracy of forecasting, using information on propensity to buy, purchase triggers and seasonal buying behaviour
  • Refine and enhance product development, based on factual accuracy
  • Identify customers’ preferred communication channels so organisations communicate with them in the way they want
  • Allow for hypertargeted, relevant messages to be delivered to customers, reaching them at exactly the right time and in the right place, reducing spend on ineffective marketing campaigns
  • Improve productivity and efficiency across a business through integrated systems
  • Boost precision and accuracy of customer lifecycle management
  • Minimise risk to businesses by performing address validation in real-time
  • Support regulatory compliance

Just as customers now choose to communicate with businesses in whichever channel they prefer, their expectations will be raised even further the more they experience those businesses embracing Single Customer View.

Customers will expect a streamlined, consistent experience which demonstrates intelligence-sharing across the business. They will assume that different departments across a business have access to the same information. If a particular offer does not appeal to a customer when called by a contact centre, they don’t want to receive exactly the same offer across a different channel – by email or physical mail, perhaps. It’s frustrating for the customer, and costly for the business. They expect businesses to have shared this information, and amended their contact strategy accordingly.

Patience will run thin for those companies that cannot provide this experience, and empowered, time-strapped consumers will vote with their feet, or their mouse, and take their customer elsewhere.

 

By Marc Hirtz, VP Customer Engagement Solutions at Pitney Bowes. 

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