A single customer view in a crazychannel world? Don’t be stupid!

Virtually all the surveys of IT priorities that have been published over the last year have put achievement of a single customer view (described in various ways and usually abbreviated as SCV), as one of the top priorities of companies, while its absence is one of CIOs’ top concerns.

In the 1980s and 1990s, when companies first started their obsession with SCV, I tried with varying degrees of success to get companies to think hard about whether this was a sensible aspiration, given the costs and difficulty of achieving it and of making it available in all situations. Of course, my advice was relative to the situation.

Companies with single-channel and perhaps dual-channel marketing found it easier and lower cost to achieve. Depending on their up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, their customer retention requirements and their need for customer information during service episodes, they also often found the SCV to be a worthwhile proposition.

For companies with complex and changing channels, with requirements for customer information varying greatly according to what they wanted to do with the customer and/or what the customer wanted to do with them, the situation wasn’t so simple. I argued for a ‘less fragmented’ view, with priority given to the areas where bringing data together paid most, whether in terms of benefits to the customer, increased revenue or reduced cost. It goes without saying that the idea of data warehousing was an important part of this discussion, whether for operational customer data use or for analysis, segmentation, targeting and the like.

Today, channels – for distributing to and/or communicating with customers – are alive with change. Within less than two decades, both distribution and communication channels have moved dramatically from being mainly supplier-centric – how to get the goods to customers who have already ordered them, how to get messages to customers, to sell to and service them better – to mainly customer centric – how to choose the right channel to order through and receive the goods, how to check order progress, how to get the best service. All this whenever and wherever customers want, on whatever device they choose and, in some cases, through whichever intermediary or aggregator they prefer. Of course, some channels still work much as they worked two decades ago, but many have changed greatly.

The integrated multichannel approach of some companies aims to give each customer the same message through different channels. And this is not always easy. It requires that a company has very good information about all its customers and is managing it very well – not always the case. Depending on the product type, the channels used, the nature of the relationship and other factors, many existing customers may be unknown. Some are prospects, about whom limited information is available.

As long as different messages, propositions and offers come from a company, there is a good chance that the customer might not see an integrated approach. Competition between propositions and messages takes place. It makes companies feel uneasy and some customers dissatisfied, but others might like the process of finding the best deal from a company, while channel owners inside companies may relish intra-company competition. Some customers love this apparent chaos. They may voice this in their chats with other customers, eg. “let’s see where we can get the best deal on product X”, “let’s see what is being said about product X or company Y in different channels or on different sites”.

Put simply, especially today, there’s not only a market for products but a market for channels. As customers choose their different paths to purchase, often going down one path, then retreating and choosing another, they become exposed to a variety of propositions and messages. They may flip from a company or intermediary website, to catalogue, to a mobile app, to a social site, learning as they go, and making final decisions based on the last few pieces of information they obtain (what is available, when, where, at what price).

Should the idea of a single customer view be abandoned?

How should companies respond to this world? Should companies aim for a view which is less fragmented where it is possible and important to be so? Should they accept that an order might be made by a customer who can’t be bothered to match their identity with a pre-existing record, although they might be prepared to do so after the event, given the appropriate incentive, or that some customers simply want to remain anonymous and/or unco-ordinated by suppliers?

If this approach is taken, companies should see products, propositions and channels as competing with each other for customer attention and effort (no point in making customers work hard to get what they want), often in an experimental way. They should reject demands for consistency from sales managers and other channel owners, customers or intermediaries, who are also all in competition with each other for the customer’s attention, effort and orders.

The more a company’s value added relates to distribution (downstream activities) rather than research, development, design and manufacturing (upstream activities), the more it will have to play this game. Of course, upstream, the game is changing too, as learning quickly from what customers are doing has to be fed back more quickly to change propositions towards what customers want, but that is another matter.

The big question is, will new channels keep appearing? If so, even if SCV seems sensible, developing it may always lag behind the actuality of customer interaction. Instead, companies will have to be satisfied with a journey which will not end until new channels stop appearing.

One view is that the SCV might be helped by automating the process of flexing product, propositions, prices and messages according to their immediate effectiveness. Marketing effectiveness/resource management becomes an online, automated activity, not a batch, planned activity. This is seen at its most extreme in the affiliate message-serving platforms used to handle mobile advertising, in which access to a given customer who is online at that moment is auctioned, using information about expected cost per click-through and (in more advanced cases) cost per acquisition (of order or customer). However, this approach can be (and is) manageable without the SCV – after all, the message serving is done without knowing who the customers are.

So, in conclusion, before committing to the rather large development and data maintenance expenditure required to produce the SCV, companies should consider how their business model is evolving under the impact of channel developments. They should work out whether it is a single or a less fragmented view that they need now, and what they will need in the future.