Seeing Double

From a customer’s perspective contracting with a single provider is a convenient way of managing multiple products or services without the increased overhead of dealing with lots of separate companies.  As far as they are concerned they are a single customer dealing with a single company, regardless of how many subscriptions they hold, complaints they make or how they signed up.

From the company’s perspective it can be very different. Companies may see multiple versions of the customer, based on the different products they have, spread across their billing, CRM and collections systems and have no way to link them.

This is a common problem in many mature and growing businesses where customer information for the individual has been captured separately using different processes and systems, causing multiple different versions of an individual customer’s information to be created.

The resulting data proliferation and usability issues from attempts to store and manage customer data leads to a multitude of problems:

• Poor customer experience

• Increased cost to serve

• Inconsistent approach to customer engagement and management

• Wasted money on marketing and sales strategies

• Incorrect view of customer risk

• Incorrect application of discounts

• Regulatory non-compliance

• Inaccurate customer information for strategic decision making

There are many reasons why this has happened; historically, organisations prioritised their systems to manage products and services, rather than manage and understand their customers. Therefore, the capture and maintenance of accurate data around the customer often fell by the wayside and was deprioritised in favour of new innovation, onboarding customers, collecting cash and realising revenue.

The Solution:  A Single Customer View

The primary solution to this problem is to develop a Single Customer View (SCV) to create a consistent representation of a customer.  This SCV is usually located in a Data Warehouse, made up of multiple datasets fed from multiple sources.  This unified view allows the organisation to analyse past customer behaviour to effectively target future customer interactions, such as marketing, sales and collections processes as well as meet regulatory requirements.

But what is the catch? Single Customer view relies on accurate and complete data which is often a major roadblock, in fact the Experian Digital Marketer Report stated 89% of marketers have difficulty in creating a Single Customer View due to poor data quality*

Garbage in Garbage Out

Creating a single view of a customer requires clean data. Data quality issues can surface between datasets more often than you think and includes discrepancies such as address variations, missing name data, misspellings, gender mis-matches, the list goes on. For example; recently we encountered a tech savvy 118-year-old who had taken out a 36-month contract for an iPhoneX.  Whilst it would be great to imagine reaching 118 and committing to another 3 years, it’s more likely that a system defaulted the date of birth to 1/1/1900 when no date of birth was captured.

So what’s the Sagacity solution?

At Sagacity we have developed a solution that fixes the quality of our customer’s data and presents a single view of a customer allowing our clients to benefit from improved data quality for all of their customers as well as providing a single view of the customer enabling them to manage their customers with multiple products or services seamlessly.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

*2015 Experian Digital Marketer Report  

                    Get in touch today to find out more about how to achieve Single Customer View.