Gaining one new customer is difficult enough, so how do we get them to keep coming back and turn them into loyal brand advocates?

To build real loyalty in today’s marketplace, you need to fully utilise all available data to understand your customers’ unique needs and motivations. Once you understand how your customer makes their buying decisions, you can begin to deliver highly customised buying experiences and relevant offers.

This goes beyond simply offering the right product for the right price. A customer will likely have multiple touchpoints with your brand and it is about understanding how a customer interacts with your business in the lead up to making a purchase.

If your business is able to understand your customers, you can develop the same level of customer relationships and brand loyalty that a local store develops with its clientele of highly satisfied customers. Where a great shopkeeper remembers their customer’s names, develops a friendly rapport, and ensures they always have the right products available for each customer, your business can do the same on a much larger scale.

But without the ability to put names to faces and remember each transaction from memory, you need to do this by building a digital memory bank that everyone in your organisation can access. This is what we refer to as the single customer view (SCV), which is a readily accessible summary of a particular customer relationship across different products and channels.

This relies on bringing all of your business’ interactions with a customer together, beginning with basic details such as names and contact details, and appending new details to the record with every interaction they have. The next step is to go beyond the ‘transactional’ insight and to collect additional data points on your customers – from external sources or internal promotions to increase the ‘contextual’ understanding you have on your customers.

Simply creating a SCV won’t solve all of your problems - the actionable insights only come from the application of the right technologies for analysis.

With the right platform for bringing all of your customer data together across every channel and department, you can begin putting this data to work by segmenting and targeting customers based on their previous buying behaviours. This enables you to:

• build a customer dialogue rather than a series of product centric promotions
• choose the ideal communication cadence and method for developing new offerings for each customer group that meets their needs
• time your communications for peak purchasing periods
• allow your sales teams to have more personalised conversations with customers during every interaction.

We know from our research report, Build a successful business case for Single Customer View, that SCV prompts a range of positive actions from customers, including:

• recommending the company if asked - 57%
• pro-actively engaging with others to tell them about their experience - 45%
• leaving a positive review on the company website - 26%
• forwarding email offers from the company to family and friends - 12%
• proactively post recommendations on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter - 10%

The Single Customer View shouldn’t be a significant investment in resources and time. You can start small to build practical, and usable intelligence providing you have the right software and technology. These investments will pay measurable dividends, and potentially unlock a competitive advantage for your business.

Alan Thornton

General Manager, Data Quality Southeast Asia