How a single customer view makes your team more effective

About a decade ago, titles like Social Media Manager started popping up. These roles fill the gap a growing digital culture had created. However, these new roles also create silos. In turn, these silos create various customer profiles used by different groups within the organization. A fragmented view of the customer leads to inefficiencies, but there is an answer- a single customer view.

Single Customer View

Silos don't just exist inside departments but plague most companies. The main problem with silos is there is no way to share the insights of various teams from across your organization. Not sharing insights becomes more of an issue when another department owns a piece of your workflow. For example, when data or engineering own a process like segment-building, you risk ending with overly broad and static audiences because what you truly wanted was lost in translation. To their credit, what ends up happening is your data scientist functions like a short-order cook of database queries, making segments to order instead of giving each persona the care it deserves. This result isn't good for anyone, especially the customer.The intuitive solution to these silos is housing all marketing activities in a centralized customer data platform (CDP) like Simon Data. Here's what a marketing hub should look like:

Shared Data Insights

As any marketer knows, having access to your data is the first step in understanding your customer. Now imagine having access to data insights while gaining the ability to control and play with this data on demand. Spending time playing with data leads to understanding. Understanding leads to insights that create things like better segmentation.With a centralized hub, every department gains access to the same segments; Additionally, the database updates in real-time. Meaning, the segments created by an email manager are instantly available for the social media manager to use. In the end, each department is now targeting the same customer but with their campaigns.The ability to organize teams around customer data gives a fantastic amount of flexibility. When the friction of collaborating lessens, things happen much quicker and more efficiently.

Clear Messaging

At Simon Data, we integrate your data to your end channels. We do that by housing- data, segmentation, automation, point solutions, and end channels in a single place. Through this integration, your entire company gains a window into everything happening with your brand. This access helps maintain consistent messaging and avoids redundancies. Gaining clarity into what other teams are doing strengthens customer experiences.  

Reporting and Analysis

Another area that benefits from a centralized marketing hub is your strategy. In many organizations, making a decision happens quickly. Therefore, the choice is often made without every department weighing in. As is, partial information ends up plaguing many marketing teams. A significant perk of having a central hub is not choosing between making a quick or informed decision. The centralized UI allows comparisons of past and present campaigns across any critical metric. One such example is cross-channel vs. longitudinal segment performance. This example shows how an acquisition-focused segment has performed over x-number of campaigns. Ultimately, this campaign discovers if acquisition efforts for this segment are improving.

Why It Matters

Say you see a performance issue for a particular segment. The only problem is you don't have access to your segmentation platform. In that case, someone from marketing has to ask someone in a tech role to look into the issue. This extra step adds time to an urgent matter. However, using the single customer view, the marketer who spotted the problem can inspect it instantly. What they might find is a change in performance from the east to the west coast. Once armed with this information, marketers can quickly set up new segments. These segments can address the same buckets of people with the added metric of location. While the above is a minor tweak, without this ability living in the marketing function, this task is roughly a four-week job. Throughout an organization, everyone's time is taxed. Projects you are doing get put on the back burner as new tasks arise. Having a single customer view living inside your CDP can save you time while finding new market opportunities.