Single View of Customer with Big Data

By Dr. Yuhui Yao, VP, FWD Group Customer Analytics and Behavioral Insights, FWD Insurance

Dr. Yuhui Yao, VP, FWD Group Customer Analytics and Behavioral Insights, FWD Insurance

Omni-channel Marketing needs Single View of Customer.

As the Millennial generation becomes the biggest customer segment for most companies, Omni-channel marketing is one of top priorities for CMOs. With emerging new technologies, customer interacts with business organization by multi-channels such as advertising, email, web, app, mobile, social media and physical branch. In general, millennial generations are highly demanding and want consistent experience across different channels. Omni-channel is different from multi-channel marketing. It focuses on consistent customer experience across different channels whereas multi-channel is usually identified as a non-integrated way to approach customers.

To achieve Omni-channel marketing, many organizations use customer journey map to understand customer needs, feeling and expectation, and then design the right offer to achieve the customer experience as they promised. How to make it work? Single Customer View (SCV)is the foundation. According to Wikipedia, a Single Customer View is an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organization about its customers that can be viewed in one place, such as a single page.

A Single View of the Customer Provides Numerous Benefits.

A Single Customer View gives marketers greater insight into thecustomer demographics, personalities, behaviors, interactions, wants & needs, opinions, complains, and purchases. The SCV enables marketers and sales to deliver better campaigns and provide more useful, relevant and enjoyable experiences for their customers, and then boost revenue and achieve high conversion rate.

A study conducted by Gartner states that, “To successfully target, acquire, develop and retain customers, organizations rely on accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date customer information and insight.” According Experian study, over 84 percent of consumers would leave if they experienced the negative effects of poor customer understanding.In the past 12 months, 85 percent of companies report that they have experienced problems that could have been avoided had a SCV been in place. For those organizations with SCV, 75 percent of all customers would take positive action in response to experiencing the benefits of a SCV. 80 percent companies believe that a SCV will help them to increase sales, cross and upsell, and improve customer retention

Single View of the Customer is Hard to Build.

However, SCV is difficult to build successfully.An expert’s research suggested that 89 percent of brands have difficulties creating an SCV. The main reasons are:

1. Lack of ownership: With limited senior management support and full accountability owner, no one takes this very serious and do it fragmented.

2. Poor data quality: Since the data comes from many systems, many organizations don’t have strong data governance and data management process, the data is very dirty. This results in a poor SCV with inaccurate customer identification and customer information.

3. Misalign with business usage: Many SCVs are built by IT team. In most of cases, the design is more technique oriented that makes it misaligned with business applications.

To successfully target, acquire, develop and retain customers, organizations rely on accurate, comprehensive, up-to-date customer information and insight

Build Single View of the Customer from Both Customer and Company Perspectives

To build a useful Single View of Customer, we need to align the customer journey map and design it from both customer and business perspectives. First of all, you need to look at the customer’s journey designed by company and identify which touch point, what kind data, at which format and time to capture. Secondly, you need to think from a customer’s perceptive, what kind of data is important to make other people to know you.

The design is to capture customer data from 9 major areas. Customer interacts with company at different channel with different identities (e.g. social media ID, email, phone number, device ID). SCV needs a customer identification solution to identify them as one single customer. Demographics mean age, gender, occupation etc. Contact refers to customer contact information and opt-in status. Transaction data is to capture customer purchase, payment, and service information. Behavioral is to understand customer online and offline behaviors in terms of interest, personality, campaign response, preference etc. Normally the customer’s needs and wants are analyzed throughmachine learning and statistical modeling. Relation is to capture customer family and friend network information. With more and more usage of IoT device, we need to capture customer IoT data to know their personal heath, property (e.g. home, car) information. The voice of customer’s opinions, complains, satisfaction and interest.

Leverage Big Data technology to achieve real time 360 degree of SCV

With Hadoop technology developed from 2005, big data technology has significantly improved and is widely used by different industries. It makes SCV gain the potential to be in real-time and wide spectrum.

SCV is enabled by using both Data Lake and Data Warehouse. Data warehouse uses ETL to integrate structured data. Data Lake is to store and process un-structured data such as voice, video and web log. The SCV will extract the relevant data from Data Lake and Data Warehouse as it design. Some of the customer profile is built by using Machine Learning such as personality, needs potential, next best offer etc. CRM, Marketing Automation, Customer Portal, and BI are the key application systems using SCV.

Using big data shows customer demographics, insurance coverage gap, product and campaign recommendation, contact history, and hot events by web crawler just in one page. It quickly enables telesales to know what the customer look like, what are the customer’s insurance needs, what kind of product he/she should recommend, which promotion is more suitable for the customer and what kind of talk to carry forth in order to gain trust and a healthy relationship with the customer. .

Do it step by step.

If you appreciate the benefits of SCV and want to achieve Omni-channel to communicate consistently with your customers start building a strategy plan with the support of senior management. The sooner you get started the sooner you’ll get the reward of better customer experience and business results.