In the realm of marketing, personalisation is key. By tailoring your company’s products and services to the unique needs of your customers, better content will be developed, customer experience will be enhanced, and revenue will significantly increase. In order to do this, marketers require one important tool: data. But with big data becoming more and more prevalent in today’s digital society, marketers need a way to effectively organise such data into a coherent and comprehensible manner. Without doing so, companies would be overrun with an endless flow of unintelligible data about their customers. This method is known as the single customer view. In this blog, we will describe the benefits of a single customer view, drawing specific attention to its use in the housing associations sector.
What exactly is a single customer view?
A single customer view, at its core, is a process by which a company’s data regarding its customers is compressed and consolidated into a single centralised platform. By doing this, you will be able to gain a vast, detailed, and condensed view of their customer’s actions. The actions that you choose to record include, but are not limited to: geographical location, contact information, comments/reviews, transaction history, and general web page interaction. One of the most powerful aspects about the single customer view is the fact that it allows companies to select what type of data it collects. For instance, if your company was interested in how a certain group of customers reacted to a new product, you could design the single customer view in such a way that reveals this information.
To further clarify, a single customer view is not the same thing as a data warehouse. While a data warehouse is a consolidation of company data, it is not as structured or streamlined for a specific purpose like the single customer view. A single customer view deals solely with user data and is much more limited in terms of the types of data it collects. Because of this, a single customer view tends to be much smaller than a data warehouse and is not as universally accessible throughout the company.
Why should a business use the single customer view?
The single customer view, as briefly explained above, gives companies an effective way to promote their customer relationship. But what else does it do? Below, we have listed several important benefits that the single customer view can provide and how they can solve a variety of issues, especially in the housing associations sector.
- Cross-channel marketing data:
In the housing associations sector, one key problem that is faced is the inability to communicate effectively. Oftentimes, when tenants need something in their facility repaired, they are unable to directly report the issue to management because no single platform exists where they could be easily tracked. Tenants may report the issue from a multitude of sources and consolidating all of the data into one location to efficiently manage is not possible. This is where the single customer view comes into play. Through this process, tenants will be able to communicate with owners on a direct and real-time basis from a variety of devices/channels.
- Promote data integration:
In addition to a lack of effective communication between owner and tenant, another problem that you may confront is poor communication among the management team. Without a centralised view of your tenants’ data, the problem of isolated data isolation often arises. This means that the data you collect from your tenants is distributed throughout a series of separate data silos, as opposed to a single location. With such a system in place, communication amongst the management team becomes much more difficult and collective decisions become harder to make. Not to mention, tenant data - because it is stored in separate silos, it is prone to duplication or other errors when trying to transfer it. With inaccurate data, the quality of your services will significantly decline and the relationship between you and your tenants will deteriorate. Once again, the single customer view offers a solution to this problem. Through this process, data will be consolidated into a single centralized platform which not only promotes accessibility for all team members, but also reduces the risk of data duplication. For information on data integration, please look at one of our past blogs regarding this topic.
- Increased understanding of your client details:
The final benefit that the single customer view provides is that it provides you with a deeper understanding of your tenants’ needs, habits, and satisfaction rates. With a single data platform, you will be able to draw connections across the various sources of data that your tenants use and create detailed user profiles for each of them. With this information, you will be able to better personalise the services you provide tenants and strengthen your relationship with them.
Conclusion
The benefits that come with the single customer view are great and apply to more than just the housing associations sector. If you feel that your company is inundated by customer data, lacks a direct and efficient form of communication between management and client, or struggles with error-prone data, your business should definitely consider the single customer view. Not to mention, the fact that it allows your organisation to select what forms of data it will collect that makes this solution even more applicable for a wide range of companies.
About the author: Mark Roychowdhury is a Copywriter Intern at ei² niche consulting for #data #insights #performance www.eisquare.co.uk