Your Digital Transformation journey starts, and ends, with your customer data. As you build your Digital Transformation Strategy and Martech stack roadmap, your key consideration should be how to enable a Single Customer View (SCV): aka Customer 360.
This article will lay out some vital considerations to implementing your SCV — wherever you are on the digital maturity curve.
Business Context Impacts the Single Customer View
Your unique business context determines how best to harness customer data across all touchpoints and channels to engage with customers in a personalized, relevant, and responsive manner.
The scope and challenges of building such capability are influenced by the complexity of your business, the priority of the channel, and, of course, your budget.
Suppose you’re in e-commerce retail. With your businesses being primarily online, customer data stitching is relatively simple and can be achieved using user ID assignment by your Analytics / Dynamic Content / Commerce Management platform. Potentially, all relevant customer data such as clickstream, web, mobile app, commerce, customer service, etc., can be natively stitched by assigning a persistent user ID and building profiles and insights around that.
The complexity of assigning a unique user ID increases where multiple platforms and systems are involved. For example, consider a financial asset retail trading company whose primary customer acquisition is via online media, affiliates, and partner networks. Customer interaction with web content and mobile engagement will be via one platform. Customer onboarding, i.e., brokerage account creation, validation, approval, and financing, will be undertaken on another platform. Then, assets (product) offering and trading may occur through yet another platform. So, customer experience, marketing automation, sales automation, and service automation are all different platforms; you get the picture!
Customer Data Platforms Simplify your Customer 360
Whatever the complexity of the business context, the simplest approach to unifying customer data is to implement a Customer Data Platform (CDP). The obstacle to CDP adoption for some businesses, however, is that it represents a significant financial investment and may demand a realignment of business, processes, and people.
When a CDP is a Bridge too Far
So, if your business context does not allow you to adopt a CDP today, can you still progress your SCV journey? Here at e-CENS, we can answer that with a resounding ‘yes’. Your roadmap can apply a ‘crawl, walk, and run’ approach to enable you to benefit from customer data stitching ASAP.
Your Single Customer View Roadmap:
Level 1: Use Web and Mobile app (customer experience management or analytics platform) data to implement native user ID and stitching capabilities for personalization, audience targeting, and remarketing.
Level 2: Use your Marketing Automation (campaign management system) for data stitching. Integration with customer experience management platforms will be required.
Level 3: Use your Sales and Service systems for stitching. Note that integration with all other customer touchpoints systems will be required. A big advantage of this approach is that the userID mapping schema across all platforms is simplified.
Level 4: Use customer account ID (Online Transaction Processing: OLTP systems) synced with data warehouse (Online analytical processing: OLAP systems), which are, in turn, integrated with all customer touchpoints. This approach, though complex, allows for better data governance, customer ID security, advanced data science, and data storage management.
Level 5: Use a customer data platform (CDP). Any market leader CDP offers identity resolution, data enrichment capabilities, and robust audience management. The CDP provides visitor profiles representing your most valuable first-party data, which are segmented by shared behaviors to create audiences that fuel your marketing technology stack in real-time via connectors.
While each level of Single Customer View implementation has its challenges in terms of complexity and ROI (and each carries its own risk-rewards trade-off, to be discussed another time), they allow businesses to progress with a solution that fits their budget now while offering the flexibility to be upgraded later.
In partnership with Digital Transformation service providers such as e-CENS, you ensure that none of your efforts are ‘thrown away’ as you move from ‘Zero to Hero’ of Customer 360.
Ready to learn more about Customer 360, CDP, and Digital Transformation? Contact us at e-CENS.
