Obtaining data about your customers is easier than ever. The challenge comes when trying to make the best use of it. In order for a marketing department to effectively target the most appropriate and valuable customers, this information needs to be structured and ready for analysis.

Most organisations will use a Data Warehouse for business insight. This collects and correlates data from numerous disparate locations and company departments.

A Data Warehouse, or Big Data storage solution, is used to collect high volumes of structured and unstructured data that does not necessarily need to match to a customer, and normally falls under the remit of the IT Department. The data could be as relevant to HR, Finance, IT or any other department of an organisation as much as it is relevant for marketing. In fact the relevance for marketing is often questionable when attempting to use data mining tools to quickly extract ‘actionable’ customer data to run timely marketing campaigns.

Here are a number of key things to consider:

Data preparation is very time consuming, particularly if data received from different departments is not standardised. This can make a Data Warehouse costly to scale and maintain.

Data needs to be validated, but checks on its accuracy aren’t always made. This could lead to discrepancies that will take time when (and if) they are discovered.

As a repository for vast amounts of data, much of it may not be useful or relevant for marketing purpose. It also means a much higher possibility of duplicate customer information and other ‘dirty’ data.

The Single Customer View is different because it is an initiative which focuses solely on customers and ‘structured’ data. The structured nature of the data, which always matches to an individual customer record, ensures that the data and analytics are meaningful and relevant to any customer-focused department (predominantly Marketing, Sales and Customer Service departments.)

The initiative will therefore normally sit with the Marketing department, rather than IT and is fully focused on ensuring that marketing have access to data and a trustworthy marketing database.

Benefits of a SCV include the ability to:

Merge duplicate customer information from different silos, centralising data from online and offline channels to provide a refined, comprehensive view of each customer.

Remove inaccuracies and cleanse the data to provide you with more trustworthy insights and allow you to make informed marketing decisions.

Combine with marketing technologies to rapidly extract, visualise and analyse data at speed to identify the perfect target audience. It can also provide you with a greater understanding of campaign successes, helping to inform better multi-channel engagements with your customers.

Whereby an organisation has a Big Data or Data Warehouse storage solution, the Single Customer View can sit alongside it and take any structured data about a customer that can then be aggregated and analysed in isolation.

While a Data Warehouse is undoubtedly valuable as a repository to store all your enterprise data and for wide-reaching business intelligence, a Single Customer View can optimise customer value, sales revenue and the customer experiences.