How to Create a Single Customer View for Better Customer Experience?

It is not enough for business owners and leaders to know what their customers want; they need to know how their customers are feeling. This is where a single customer view comes in. It enables businesses to track customer sentiment, complaints, and reviews on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter in order to get a better understanding of their customer experience.

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The most successful companies these days have built up an impressive arsenal of sophisticated data analytics tools and data transformation tools such as dbt Cloud that can take all this information from different sources, like e-commerce transactions and call center records, then compare it with feedback gleaned via, e.g., Facebook and Instagram insights from consumers' social media posts or comments on review websites like Yelp, Google, or Amazon.

The result: insights into how loyal customers feel about specific products and services — and warnings about potential marketing disasters before they happen.

Define the Customer

What do customers value most in a brand experience? What are their needs and wants when it comes to purchasing your product or service? By defining these characteristics, you can create the customer journey map that will help deliver a better customer experience.

There is a difference between customers and consumers, and these terms are not strictly the same. A customer purchases goods or services, while consumers will use the products. Customers turn into consumers after consumption has occurred.

This is important to consider in instances where parents are purchasing to meet their children’s needs and desires. In this case, the parents are customers while their children are the consumers. Both of these aspects should be defined to determine the needs and wants of both parties.

What is a Single Customer View and Why do I need it?

A single customer view is a way to integrate your marketing data and customer relationship management (CRM) so that you have one complete picture of what’s happening with every customer. It also helps in targeting the right customers for the best deals or offers, which can increase conversion rates. A single customer view typically includes:

Contact information.
Demographic data such as age range and location.
Behavioral patterns like how often they shop at your store or visit your website.
Purchases made by them.
Their online behavior on social media platforms.

Understanding your customers through this holistic approach will help create better relationships between companies and consumers while also increasing profitability.

The customer experience is the sum of all interactions with a company or product, from purchase to post-purchase. With a single customer view, you can build and maintain relationships with your customers that will keep them coming back for more.

In a study by Infoquest, a completely satisfied customer is expected to contribute 2.6 times more revenue than a moderately satisfied customer and 14 times more than a moderately dissatisfied customer.

How can you Create a Single Customer View?

Do you want to deliver a better customer experience? Are your customers frustrated with their interactions with you, or do they feel like they're not being heard? If so, then it's time to take a new approach. You can determine when there are gaps in your organizational structure or potential safety risks with appropriate whistleblowing systems in place.

Employee satisfaction has a direct correlation with customer satisfaction because employee interactions with customers are the primary contributors to the customer experience.

A single customer view is key to delivering an excellent customer experience because it means that all of the information about each individual is collected and analyzed together. This provides insights into what drives them, where they are likely to spend money, how often they interact with your business, and more.

With this knowledge, businesses can improve their products and services in ways that will make their customers happy, which will improve customer value management and drive more revenue for the business.

You can use the same data for multiple purposes. Use a single database to store all customer information and integrate it with your other systems. Develop an open API solutions for self-storage or centralized hub that will allow you to share data from across silos within your organization. Designate a common platform through which employees, business partners, customers, suppliers, and any others who need access may interact with all of the relevant company information related to their needs.

Why should you care about your Customers' Needs?

A customer with a single view will be able to see all of their interactions and purchases with your business in one place, which makes it easy for them to get the service they want. For example, if a customer can't find a specific vape juice flavor, instead of getting frustrated because you don't carry that specific thing or anything like it, just follow up with them by asking what other products might interest them so you can help solve their problem.

If your customers are not satisfied with their experience, they will take their business elsewhere. Even worse, 95% of customers will share a bad experience with their peers and only 87% will share when they’ve had a good experience. This means that word of mouth will increase negative views about your company faster than good ones.

If you can easily identify your customer needs, you will be able to easily persuade customers that purchasing your goods or services is in their best interest. Simply assessing past data from previous customers will not let you identify your customer’s needs. The appropriate data analytics and recognition of customer behavior patterns will let your company provide goods and services catered to a variety of potential customers.

How to Use Data Analytics to Identify Patterns in Customer Behavior?

A single customer view will provide clean data to run data analytics. You can use these insights and similar methods, when designing your marketing strategy or sales methodology, or understanding the demographics of your customers. The process that is typically followed involves:

Identifying common behavioral patterns.
Creating a customer persona based on insights from pattern analysis.
Assessing whether there are any differences between demographic groups.

Zonka provides tools that can integrate with customer relationship management (CRM) software and with data analysis tools to provide an opportunity for retailers to measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns by analyzing which channels perform best at driving traffic into physical stores.

Complete reports about various business aspects such as response insights, text analytics of comments or unstructured texts, and location insights if your company has multiple locations, can bring you one step closer to identifying patterns in customer behavior.

Tools that will help you Track Your Customers' Behavior, Preferences, and Buying Habits

The customer experience is at the heart of every successful business. Customers are willing to pay more for a better experience, and they will abandon you in droves if they have a bad one. With so much focus being placed on customer retention and acquisition, it's no surprise that there has been an explosion in data about customers and their behaviors.

But with so many ways to collect data from your customers — like online surveys, social media posts, and call center conversations — how do you know what information to use?

Some voice of customer survey tools that are available include:

CSAT Surveys - to help you measure customer satisfaction at key areas and help you show employees how their actions impact customer satisfaction.
Offline Surveys - a survey station can be incorporated into your store to allow simple, paper-free data collection.
Google Analytics - to find your roas (return on ad spend).

Monitor your Progress and Make Changes as Needed

When implementing any change in marketing strategy, develop key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets. You will need to develop a baseline with data collection, and a single customer view can help aggregate this data.

Once this data is collected, you can determine areas that your company needs to address to increase sales and drive revenue up. Continuous improvement is an essential practice that involves feedback loops and frequent adjustments to strategies.

The Importance of Understanding your Competitors and what they are doing with their own customers

You can learn from your competition and use their experiences to increase the amount of data you have access to. Competition lets you know what your customer wants and needs. You can use this information to provide them with something they need or want that you may have been overlooking, leading to increased sales and profitability in return.

It helps determine which markets you should focus on when it comes time for expansion. Those where there is not much competition will require less capital investment than those that already have companies competing against one another. This is especially true if the company going into these untapped markets offers products or services that were previously unavailable.

Analyzing your competition’s success and failures helps with targeting new customers by looking at what's working for other successful brands in similar industries. It also gives an understanding of “what not to do” based on a competitor’s mistakes or negative reviews left about a particular business online.

Takeaways for Businesses who want to Create their Own Single Customer View

The single customer view is the holy grail for most businesses. If they can understand and profile their customers, all sorts of opportunities open up to them that would otherwise have been unavailable.