How brands can better utilise the single view of a customer

Organisations are now at the stage where they realise they need a single view of the customer to understand all the relationships that the customer has with the company.

Graeme Boorer, advisory board chairman at the Customer Data Institute discussed with Digital Nation how brands can use a single view of a customer to better tailor their messages.

“Particularly for privacy purposes, because if one of those organisations says don't send me this, then all the others are bound legally not to send it,” he said

“Also, from business intelligence and analytics, how can you trust your business intelligence, if your data is misleading?”

Customer data has undergone a transformation, from once a few points of information to now hundreds of data points, a single view of a customer aggregates all that data into one place.

Boorer explains that the origins of a single view of a customer came from marketers. Beginning from getting a customer’s correct details to then having information about them so companies send them the right message.

“It was very marketing, but then we started looking at the business intelligence side of things and then we start looking at the fact that people would lose trust in an organisation if they didn't get their data and that's in addition to breaking the law,” he said.

Boorer said a single view of the customer betters the relationship between the customer and a brand.

He said many marketing technology platforms like CDPs are another “evolution” in the journey to get a single view of the customer.

“This complete, one-to-one marketing, which Don Peppers invented, it's all the quest to understand and build relationships originally with customers. Then to build experience, but increasingly to build trust with customers, because trust isn't the new experience,” Boorer explained.