Key Issues in Achieving a Singular Customer View

Tying up data is difficult, but every business needs a single customer view to truly understand a customer's value to the brand. With all the different customer touchpoints, businesses face numerous challenges in effectively collecting data to create a holistic view of each customer. Without a unified view, delivering personalised experiences, predicting behaviour, and maximising customer lifetime value becomes impossible.

The top three issues that retailers face in achieving a single customer view are as follows:

1. Missing data

A significant challenge in building a comprehensive customer profile is when customers don’t provide key pieces of information, such as their email addresses. Email is a critical data point for businesses to track customer interactions, send personalised offers, and manage communications. However, many customers opt to purchase through channels that bypass email collection.

For instance, payment methods like Apple Pay anonymise the customer’s email address, making it harder for retailers to tie the transaction back to a customer’s profile. In-store purchases are another obstacle. Many customers choose to shop without providing their email, either for reasons of privacy or simply out of habit. It's difficult to link the transaction to a specific customer without an email address, leading to fragmented data.

This creates a significant data gap in the journey, making it harder to track customer behaviour, personalise marketing, and offer targeted promotions. To address this, businesses must find alternative ways to capture customer data, such as incentivising sign-ups through loyalty programs or offering in-store options for customers to provide their contact information, such as digital receipts.

2. Data Silos

Another key challenge is that customer data is often spread across multiple systems that don’t communicate properly with each other. For instance, in-store customer purchase data might be stored in the point-of-sale (POS) system, while on-site purchases are tracked in your eCommerce platform. Meanwhile, marketing subscriptions are stored in an email platform, and customer service interactions may be recorded in a CRM system. These disconnected data points make creating a cohesive, unified customer profile difficult. Each system has its own view of the customer, and data is often duplicated or inconsistent across these platforms.

To overcome this, businesses must review their existing tech stack to ensure that their platforms properly speak to one another. They may need to invest in customer data platforms (CDPs), allowing real-time data syncing across all touchpoints. This ensures that no matter where the customer interacts with the brand—whether it’s online, in-store, or through customer service—there’s one central repository of information that can be accessed and utilised to deliver a seamless, personalised experience.

3. Inconsistent or Poor Data Quality

Even if a business manages to pull all customer data into one system, poor data quality can still present a significant hurdle. This issue can manifest in many ways: missing or incorrect details, duplicate records and outdated information. When customer data isn’t clean or up-to-date, it results in inaccurate insights and can lead to ineffective marketing, poor customer experiences, and wasted resources.

For example, if a customer changes their email address or phone number, and the system isn’t updated, marketing campaigns may be sent to the wrong contact or not reach the intended recipient. Similarly, if duplicate customer records exist in the system, the customer could be treated as two separate individuals, resulting in fragmented marketing efforts and missed opportunities.

To solve this, businesses need to establish processes for regularly cleaning and validating data. This might involve using data hygiene tools, establishing protocols for manual data checks, or investing in machine learning technologies that automatically detect duplicates and inconsistencies. The goal is to ensure that the collected data is accurate and comprehensive to serve as a reliable foundation for creating a singular customer view.

In Summary

Achieving a singular customer view is crucial for delivering personalised, relevant experiences and gaining a deeper understanding of customer behaviour. However, the journey is fraught with challenges.

The solutions associated with achieving a unified customer view can vary by business, depending on platforms being used and the business itself.

By addressing these issues — encouraging customers to share information, investing in systems that can provide a unified view of the customer, and ensuring data accuracy — businesses can create a single customer view that drives more effective marketing strategies and enhances the overall customer experience. With the right tools and processes, businesses can overcome these hurdles and build a more connected and customer-centric brand.