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Driving Value from your single customer view
Ready to implement a single customer view in your business?
The demands placed on the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) have steadily been increasing over the past few years. The appetite for a digital-first, customer experience has accelerated as the volume of customer touchpoints have increased. Customer data is now streaming into businesses from every interaction, across multiple devices and across a growing number of channels. CMOs must now use customer data to drive profitable growth, report on ROI, to prove that their marketing activities are resulting in a positive impact to the business’ bottom line.
CMOs are now expected to be a direct influence on business growth, driving efficiencies and maximising ROI. There is increasing pressure for their business decisions to be evidenced with laser-focused marketing metrics and based on accurate customer insights. These decisions should be data-driven, well-informed and reportable, providing the CMO with the opportunity to increase business profitability and gain competitive advantage across a constantly evolving commercial landscape.
Now seen as owners of the customer experience, CMOs must find strategic ways to make profitable business decisions based on the analysis and activation of their customer data, rather than on guesswork.
There is now a heightened need for today’s CMO to manage every aspect of the customer experience, using business intelligence tools to better understand customers and anticipate future predictions and trends. This need has all created a paradigm shift for the CMO, pushing the role into the spotlight.
With marketing budgets under scrutiny, CMOs are seeking efficient, data-driven ways to gain visibility over and understand the customer journey. From initial inquiry to product purchase, and post-sales support, CMOs need a deep understanding of how their customers are engaging and interacting with their business.
To provide personalised, relevant and timely experiences to customers across all touchpoints, the CMOs who stand a chance of driving profit will be the ones who derive customer-centric insights from their data. This requires the ability to centralise and integrate all your relevant customer behavioural and marketing data sources into one place. Despite the need for this complete customer view, achieving this level of visibility is proving to be a persistent stumbling block for many businesses.
CONTENTS
The single customer view - solving the customer data conundrum
The Customer Data Platform - Enabling your Single Customer View
Should you buy a packaged CDP for your single customer view?
Why you should use a composable CDP for your single customer view
Why a warehouse-centric approach makes sense for your single customer view
How to build a scalable single customer view with a composable CDP
Discover how you can centralise and integrate all your relevant customer and marketing activity data for better marketing attribution.
The single customer view
solving the customer data conundrum
91% of marketers acknowledge the importance of responding to insights at speed in their role, but 55% only have slight or moderate confidence in their data analytics and insights.
[A 2022 report by GfK and CMO Council]
The ability to collect, store, extract and drive value from customer data that is all housed in one place has become the holy grail of marketing and, with only 14% of organisations having achieved a 360-degree view of the customer, (Gartner, Inc) the single customer view is frequently referred to as a ‘marketing utopia’.
Pulling an organisation’s customer data together in one place to make the best use of the information is no small feat. Despite their new data-driven responsibilities, it’s common for CMOs to lack the necessary data access, technical capabilities and talent to extract real-time high value from their marketing activities.
A recent study states that many CMOs feel they have insufficient tech and human capabilities needed to fulfil their responsibilities. They are battling with the limitations of siloed systems, siloed processes and isolated data. The priority for CMOs today is to invest in technological capabilities that offer full visibility over the customer journey. The focus is to provide a way to connect all of their digital marketing touchpoints and create a single view of every customer interaction across those digital channels.
CMOs are looking at market solutions where they can aggregate their data from their siloed systems, providing them with a single source of truth, a solution that will enable a single customer view.
What is a single customer view?
The single customer view is a framework that seeks to consolidate all of your customer insights across all of your data sources, integrating them into a single centralised location. With a complete 360-degree view of your customer, CMOs are presented with a golden opportunity to eliminate fragmented and siloed data to create a single customer data hub that can be used to build personalised and seamless customer experiences.
The single customer view provides comprehensive records of each customer and a coherent, timely and easily accessible platform for customer data across the business. With customer data being held in a centralised location, CMOs have the ability to enrich their data and syndicate its value out to a variety of tools.
5 BENEFITS OF A SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW
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A single customer view makes it easier to analyse data across different activities
A single customer view provides a comprehensive view of customer data, allowing businesses to gain valuable insights into their customers' behaviours, preferences, and needs.
A single customer view makes your data more actionable
With your customer data in one place, it becomes easier to extract insights that will help you to identify how to pre-empt and trigger sales. A single customer view can help you identify inefficiencies in your marketing strategy, giving you the insights into where to spend your marketing budget, and where to avoid spending money on a campaign that doesn’t perform.
2
A single customer view helps you get closer to your customers
By having visibility over the entire customer journey, you get a deeper understanding of your customers behaviours, you can detect any microtrends, gain the insights needed to create precise marketing strategies and manage customer journeys by making use of the data collected from all of your customers. From initial awareness through to service and brand loyalty, with a single customer view, you can act on the data you collect from all channels and touchpoints, allowing you to personalise your customer relationships.
3
A single customer view helps you respect customer preferences and privacy
By centralising and segmenting the different permissions that customers provide, you will meet regulations for data privacy. The single customer view provides you with unified customer profiles that can keep track of all collected data, along with any processing, making subject access requests (SARs) and data erasures easier in the event of a breach.
4
A single customer view helps you better understand your customers
With your data in one place, you can segment your customers according to interest, behaviours or characteristics, providing you with accurately classified customer groups. You can create more effective marketing campaigns in line with your customer criteria, generating more targeted messaging and consequently, achieving higher conversion rates, improving customer loyalty.
5
Challenges in creating a Single Customer view
Creating a single customer view can be a challenge as customer data is often stored in disparate systems, including CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and e-commerce platforms. However, by bringing this data together, businesses can gain a more comprehensive understanding of their customers and make informed decisions about how to engage with them.
Data silos
Customer data is often stored in different systems and departments, making it difficult to bring together into a single view.
Data privacy
The collection and use of customer data is subject to privacy laws, making it difficult to bring customer data together into a single view while still protecting customer privacy.
Data quality
The quality of customer data can vary, with some data being outdated or inaccurate. This can make it challenging to get an accurate representation of your customers.
Integration
Integrating customer data from different systems can be challenging, particularly if those systems use different data formats or structures.
Despite these challenges, the benefits of a single customer view make it a critical component of any marketing strategy.
The Customer Data Platform
Enabling your Single Customer View
Although the benefits are compelling, achieving a single customer view should not be seen as a silver bullet solution. There are a multitude of factors to consider and an array of approaches to how to achieve your single customer view.
Nevertheless, it’s impossible to achieve a single view of the customer without the right software in place to enable this. Enter the Customer Data Platform.
The Customer Data Platform is frequently cited as the best solution where the single customer view can exist. Defined by the CDP Institute as “packaged software that maintains a unified, persistent customer database which is accessible to external systems,” CDPs are purpose-built to collect data from a wide range of sources and unify the data to form a comprehensive view of the customer across devices and channels. In essence, the CDP acts as a ‘traffic director’ of your data, instructing your data what to do and where to go.
The Customer Data Platform is designed to stitch multiple tools together and ensure the data those tools are collecting is standardised across your business. It can support CMOs to not only unify, but activate customer data, enhancing the customer experience across every channel and every platform.
Whether it's data from your CRM, website, call centres, email marketing platform, advertising campaigns or social media, a CDP streams every piece of data you have from every source, channel and customer touchpoint to help you connect and activate your business goals.
If your single customer view is held within a CDP, it can act as a one-stop-shop for centralising, integrating and activating your customer data, providing you with an engine to map your customer journey. With this complete customer view, you can collect all your marketing activities and connect it to your downstream transactional systems to gain end to end visibility of your customer's lifecycle., putting you on the path to revenue-generating insights and business profitability.
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These CDPs focus on capturing and managing customer transaction data, such as purchase history, product preferences, and customer behaviour.
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These CDPs track and analyse customer behaviour across multiple channels and touchpoints, such as website interactions, email engagement, and mobile app usage.
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These CDPs use advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms to gain insights into customer behaviour and preferences. They can also be used to predict future customer actions and optimise marketing campaigns.
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These CDPs integrate customer data from various sources and provide real-time access to customer information for marketing, sales, and customer service teams.
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These CDPs focus on resolving customer identity across devices and channels, and creating a unified profile for each customer.
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These CDPs enable marketers to segment their customer-base based on specific criteria, such as demographics, behaviour, and preferences.
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These CDPs use customer data to personalise marketing messages and experiences in real-time.
Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) have become a priority for the future-focused CMO, however, although the goal of the CDP has arrived to create a single view of the customer, the solution has not come without its limitations.
Thankfully, CDPs are constantly evolving to meet the needs of modern business. This has sparked a compelling debate around the CDP model best suited for businesses with plans to scale. Before we explore the current dialogue making waves across the CDP market space, let's define the two CDP models:
Customer Data Platforms - Build Vs Buy
Packaged CDPs
Pre-built, off the shelf software designed as all-in-one solutions for marketers with very little IT support
Composable CDPs
Built directly on existing data architecture out of components that can be switched out for newer software as and when needed
SHOULD YOU BUY A PACKAGED CDP FOR YOUR SINGLE CUSTOMER VIEW?
Both models of CDP offer a promise to create a single view of the customer across all touchpoints, however, the thinking around the traditional pre-packaged CDP model is that they will become obsolete in future years, with some businesses struggling with the rigid templation and their “cookie-cutter” data model.
By design, packaged CDPs can create a high level of risk to businesses as they collect and unify customer data within the CDP system, creating yet another data silo.
Your customer data streams into the pre-built CDP, is separate from all other customer data and exists outside of your internal controls and governance. This heightens security and privacy risk and defeats the goal to eliminate silos. You achieve a single customer view within the CDP but you’ll be collecting and exporting your most valuable customer data to an isolated system that lives outside of your firewall.
Sending all of your customer data to a packaged CDP has made it difficult for organisations to scale their customer data architecture, and ultimately, data activation suffers. Furthermore, issues are likely to arise such as data replication, non-scalable data architecture, and a higher total cost of ownership. All of these factors highlight the limited lifespan of the packaged CDP, making it only a partial solution.
Why you should use a composable CDP for your single customer view
Traditionally, customer data platforms were pre-built, packaged applications that provided a set of fixed features and functionality for managing customer data. These solutions are typically off-the-shelf and can be quickly deployed without extensive customisation. Packaged CDPs were ideal for companies that have limited technical resources and want a simple, straightforward solution for creating and activating their single customer view, but created yet another silo of information with their business and became expensive to run when run at-scale.
A composable CDP, on the other hand, is a flexible solution that allows companies to build custom CDP solutions by combining individual components or building blocks.
Segment, Rudderstack, Hightouch, Snowplow and other vendors offer packaged and composable CDP products and services, and Rittman Analytics has experience in implementing all of these vendor options. Click the button below to find-out more about each of these products.
Wider Data Access
A warehouse-centric composable CDP in combination with reverse ETL tools provides access to a much wider and complete set of customer behavioural data, including both online and offline activity. This wider data access allows marketers to build more complete and accurate customer profiles, which can drive better audience building, customer journey orchestration, and data activation.
More Effective Audience Building
By having access to a wider set of customer behavioural data, marketers can build more accurate and effective audiences. For example, they can target customers based on their offline purchase history, website interactions, and mobile app usage. This can lead to more personalised and effective marketing campaigns, which can drive better business outcomes.
Better Customer Journey Orchestration
A warehouse-centric composable CDP in combination with reverse ETL tools makes it possible to orchestrate customer journeys in real-time, based on a complete understanding of the customer. This can lead to more personalised and effective customer journeys, which can improve customer engagement and drive better business outcomes.
More Effective Data Activation:
By having access to a wider set of customer behavioural data, marketers can activate their customer data in a more effective and personalised way. For example, they can use customer data to personalise marketing messages and experiences, optimise marketing campaigns and drive better business outcomes.
Want to hear more about the warehouse-first benefits of the composable CDP? Listen in to Drill to Detail Ep 94 (Rudderstack and the Warehouse-First Customer Data Platform)
Why a warehouse-centric approach makes sense for your single customer view
Businesses who choose to use a packaged CDP will need to undertake an overhaul of all their systems and data, integrating them into a new database. This process can cause significant delays to activating and extracting value from your data.
Creating a CDP based around your existing data warehouse, on the other hand, is an approach that provides long-term value and instant data activation.
It’s far easier to centralise your data in a warehouse, using platforms such as Fivetran. This warehouse-first approach eliminates the event of creating siloed data in third-party tools, allowing easy access to multiple data sources - in a single customer view. Your data becomes unified, consistent and accurate, enabling your team to perform analysis and modelling - both of which are impossible to do without a warehouse. With a composable CDP, you can gain better control of your data, obtain a single customer view and activate your data in the business tools you use every day. Enter the Reverse ETL solution.
WHAT IS REVERSE ETL?
Reverse ETL is a data management process in which the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) cycle is reversed. Instead of loading data into a data warehouse from external sources, Reverse ETL reverses the process by extracting data from the data warehouse, transforming it into a format suitable for external systems.
Reverse ETL technology takes cleaned and processed data from your data warehouse and ingests it back into your applications. It is at this point that you can activate your data and conduct complex operational analytics that would be possible with BI tools alone. With a Reverse ETL solution, you can easily connect your customer data from your current data warehouse to other marketing tools. You can continue to work in your existing tools and enjoy a more enriched data set.
RudderStack's Reverse ETL feature, for example, allows businesses to use the customer data that already exists in your data warehouse and direct it to your entire data stack. RudderStack builds their architecture around the approach that the data warehouse is an indispensable tool and should be viewed as ‘a first-class citizen’. Using RudderStack enables the seamless collection of data from different sources, (online and offline) and securely ingests them into your warehouse. With their Reverse ETL feature, Rudderstack collects customer data and routes it throughout your stack to destinations, such as your warehouse and cloud tools.
Now being seen as one of the simplest tools to use to collect customer event data from multiple sources and route it to all of your downstream marketing and customer applications, Rudderstack is a first port of call for businesses who want a warehouse-centric approach to create a single source of truth.
To get a deeper understanding of reverse ETL tools and other technologies to activate your customer data, click below.
How to build a scalable single customer view with a composable CDP
Trying to piece together a solution for your customer data is not for the faint of heart and yet, the need to build a single customer view to support your business as it scales is only set to increase. Making the right decision on the CDP model you adopt to activate and drive value from your customer data has never been more important.
You’re likely to be on the beginning stages of your journey towards leveraging customer data to drive real business value. For the best results, you will need to build a CDP that works in tandem with your current data warehouse to achieve your single customer view. This will, however, require considerable technical skills and expertise.
We know that many businesses are lacking the internal resources and skills to build, deploy or maintain a CDP. That’s why working with a data and analytics partner such as Rittman means the heavy-lifting is done for (and with) you.
By partnering with Rittman, you receive the technical expertise and support to turn your data warehouse into a customer data platform. This means that your existing data warehouse remains your source of truth.
Being future-proof is central to the DNA of a composable CDP; you avoid vendor lock-in and have the freedom to choose the tools best suited for your storage, modelling and data activation.
Rittman Analytics is a boutique analytics consultancy, helping businesses reimagine the tools and systems they adopt to manage and activate their customer data. We view the Customer Data Warehouses as the New Customer Data Platform, promoting a warehouse-first approach to building a CDP to drive your single customer view. For businesses who wish to scale, using a composable CDP is the best approach.
Already purchased a packaged CDP?
By now, you may have noticed serious shortcomings emerging with your existing CDP. You may already have realised that it will struggle to grow with your business over time….. By partnering with Rittman, we can help you disassemble your current CDP functionality into separate components. We will also help you reassemble the relevant components to your business in a more flexible and scalable way, allowing you to capture the benefits of a composable CDP.
Creating modern and scalable data stacks for all business types, Rittman Analytics can support you to use a composable CDP to create your single customer view. This will enable you to centralise your data sources and provide your data team with best practices and a modern analytics workflow. Ready to find out more?
Rittman Analytics is a boutique analytics consultancy specializing in the modern data stack and composable customer data platforms.
We can help you get started with Segment, Rudderstack, Hightouch or Snowplow, centralise your data sources and enable your end-users and data team with best practices and a modern analytics workflow.
If you’re looking for some help and assistance building-out your analytics capabilities on a modern, flexible and modular data stack, contact us now to organize a 100%-free, no-obligation call — we’d love to hear from you!
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