What Would You Do with a Single Customer View?

In today's competitive marketplace, ecommerce companies need to capture a 360-degree picture of their potential consumers and create a single customer view (SCV). In fact, according to according to Neil Capel, CEO for Sailthru, it's the only method to overcome data silos perpetuated by the many channels through which consumers can engage with a brand and make purchases - and this holistic view of the consumer should include both their behaviour across all channels, as well as their interests and unique personality indicators.

A Single Customer View (SCV) is the representation of all the customer data an organisation may have on its customers. There are many advantages from attaining a unified view across all channels, specifically for marketing this includes the ability to analyse past behaviour to better personalise future interactions with customers.

By understanding and storing this type of information, companies can create a precise, wide-angled picture of each consumer's shopping behaviour, as well as explicit and implicit interests. Well-designed SCVs can be an extremely lucrative and eye-opening undertaking.

For example, if you know that a particular customer tends to be on her desktop from 7pm to 9pm on weekdays, you could send her an email or a push notification at 7.30 PM encouraging her to complete a purchase she began on her smartphone earlier in the day and then abandoned. In the same communication you could leverage the SCV to offer a series of other products that are relevant to this specific user based on her previously demonstrated behaviours and interests, not just on this single abandoned product.

Here are the type of questions companies can answer if they have a true SCV:

1. At what times and for how long does an individual user typically access your site?
    
2. How frequently to they visit via desktop, tablet or smartphone? Which specific devices?
    
3. How do they engage via email, mobile, onsite and social?
    
4. Which individual items do they linger on and which content pages do they read?
    
5. What do they place in their shopping cart and what do they take out?
    
6. What are the consistencies in what the individual browses; the style, fit, fabric, colour, material, etc?
    
7. How frequently do they actually purchase items on tablets vs. smartphones?
    
8. When they place an item in their shopping cart via smartphone to save for later, how long does it generally take for them to buy it - and how often do they abandon the purchase?

In addition, this consumer profile could take into account offline information:

• What do they purchase in a company's physical stores?
   
• What types of interactions have they had with call centres?
   
• Have they expressed satisfaction or displeasure with the retailer and the products they've purchased?

"SCVs at scale can also offer insight into larger aggregate trends involving all of the consumers that visit a company's site to enrich their customers' experience by curating and personalising the content they showcase," concluded Capel.