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Single Customer View (SCV): What it is & How to Create One
Your essential guide to single customer view: what it is, why do you need one, how to create one, and why it's so important. We also dive into the key challenges of a single customer view, and some use cases.
What is a single customer view?
Building a single customer view (SCV) requires a comprehensive way to collect as much relevant information about a customer as possible. The aim of this process is to connect data in a meaningful way, removing duplicates and outdated data, storing that information in one place, and operationalizing it: making it available to analytics teams, customer-facing teams and systems. Because of how this created customer profile offers a full range of information, SCVs can sometimes also be referred to as 360, 360-degree, or unified customer views.
Having this centralized view provides a single source of truth, increasing productivity and agility across the organization. For example, customer service agents find it easier to quickly pull out purchase history, support inquiries and other interactions that matter, helping to enhance customer experience.
Why do you need a single customer view?
Utilizing an SCV as a business can be incredibly effective for a number of reasons. For example, uniting different sources of data makes it easier for an organization to stay on top of key elements of a customer journey. Here are just a handful of the ways that an SCV will benefit any enterprise:
Fraud prevention
Fraud understanding and prevention is something that an SCV plays a pivotal part in. Fraud prevention is the process of coordinating a variety of tools, technologies, systems, and strategies to detect and protect against fraud activity. An SCV is the key component to providing rich data-driven insights, and flagging any suspicious activities.
Know Your Customer (KYC) and onboarding
SCVs by their very nature allow for a thorough and highly accurate customer onboarding process. The due diligence process, which is pivotal for any KYC onboarding approach, greatly reduces the chances of fraud or money laundering by quickly identifying potential threats.
Cross-channel marketing data
Most modern businesses have a wide variety of touchpoints that customers and clients interact with. An SCV makes it possible to seamlessly keep up with and execute marketing campaigns across each of these, with any efforts able to be personalized to each individual. This extends to search history, purchase history, social media usage, and customer service interactions. The entire customer journey is able to be reviewed in a moment.
Personalizing the customer experience
Personalized messaging and procedures are one of the most effective ways to convert passive customers into engaged ones. An SCV allows an organization to make any messaging, marketing campaigns, or special offers personalized to the individual they’re contacting. Having this clearer picture of consumer behaviors makes it easier to strike a chord with your audience.
Improved segmentation
Segmentation is the process of collating customers or clients into specific brackets in order to better understand and interact with them. An SCV not only supports this process, but also allows for more complex segmentation to be executed. This extends beyond segmenting by demographics or location, to more detailed factors such as what point the customer journey a consumer is at.
Make informed marketing decisions
Guesswork and average consumer trends aren’t the most effective way to market. An SCV gives you an overview of engagement, lifestyle, and communication preferences, which in turn makes it possible to confidently target customers without any element of guesswork.
Better customer service
An increasing importance is being placed on organizations to ensure they provide a comprehensive and tailored customer service experience. Brand reputation is vital to most in the banking sector, while any successful organization understands that customers need to feel seen in order to remain loyal. Having a detailed overview of every interaction a customer or client has had with an organization makes it easy to reply accurately and promptly to any query or concerns. This could even extend to being provided with a detailed dashboard when someone calls or contacts your enterprise.
How to create a single customer view
It’s important to know what steps to take to effectively create an SCV. To ensure that your SCV is as trustworthy and accurate as it should be, follow this process:
1. Identifying data sources
For the process to begin effectively, data from both internal and external sources needs to be identified. With all this to hand, it’s the responsibility of those creating the SCV to decide what is or isn’t relevant. It makes sense to include information from a variety of sources, such as banking systems, healthcare records, government files, accounting software, ERPs, sales records, and loyalty programs, as well as enrich it with external data such as Corporate registry and watchlist information.
2. Data ingestion
When all data sources have been identified, they need to be ingested into a platform that will prepare the data for matching and eventually create the SCV. Typically, parsing and cleansing are performed to ensure the data is standardized and in a digestible format for the next step – data matching.
3. Data matching (customer profile creation)
One of the most challenging aspects of SCV creation. The hurdle here is unifying data from a series of locations, without duplicating data or creating contradictory profiles. Most traditional systems use record-to-record matching which has serious limitations, but modern approaches turn to much more accurate entity resolution technology that takes all context into account to make the most accurate matches.
4. Apply analytics to generate insight
Using analytics tools and tactics such as graph analytics, scoring models and AI and ML, make it possible to unlock valuable insights from an SCV.
As an example, understanding the connections between businesses and their directorships can help uncover money laundering activities, just as well as customer behavior data such as website traffic and engagement points can be used to harvest useful insight into where marketing or promotional campaigns are or aren’t working. This highly tailored single view will also help to foster better patient outcomes in healthcare, where an organization could be dealing with tens of thousands of unique needs and conditions.
The company-wide nature of an SCV also means that departments and regional units no longer need to work in silos, but, in contrast, leverage the enterprise-wide information for the use of them all.
5. Take action
With the insight garnered from analytics run on an SCV, organizations can take action in a concentrated and hyper-personalized manner. This could mean targeting specific current account holders during promotional efforts,, detecting risky behavior for further fraud investigations, or helping governments to take defensive action.
What are the challenges of building a single customer view?
Organizations that choose to create an SCV will face challenges at certain points of their journey. Here are some of the most common, as well as what you can do to circumvent them:
Siloed data across departments, business units, and geographical locations
Challenge:
Segmentation of your internal teams creates hurdles and barriers to alignment. Over time, data can become siloed across the enterprise after decades of collecting it in different systems, with regional subsidiaries using different applications. When different departments work separately, with only partial elements of an SCV available to them, it becomes incredibly hard to craft an aligned strategy with a tailored customer-centric approach.
Solution:
Aligning teams as early as possible is the best way to alleviate this issue. The key is to find a data matching tool which can deal with the needed high volumes of data, that also has a reliable matching accuracy. A good example of this is entity resolution.
Poor data quality
Challenge:
This factor usually halts the successful creation of any SCV. Data that’s from legacy systems, found in different formats, not connected, outdated, duplicated, or fragmented can set an enterprise up for failure from the outset, making it impossible to make any meaningful insights.
Solution:
Resolving data quality issues is very challenging. It’s vital to address different aspects of data quality and help create a comprehensive and reliable data set for analysis and decision-making. There are three main phases involved: data curation, data matching, and data improvement.
While turning to a professional can make it possible to resolve these issues from top to bottom, other steps you can take here might be to:
Audit and monitor the entire data collection process
Use a central data management strategy to build a data foundation
Find analytical talent who are able to spot any issues
Use the right technology and software
Continue to monitor any issues over a long period of time
Inability to link technologies
Challenge:
As much of a positive impact technology has had on business, it’s also introduced new obstacles. Typically, every organization will have gone through dozens of accounting systems alone, not limited to the ones they inherit through mergers and acquisitions. In many cases, it is extremely challenging to link these in a meaningful way.
Solution:
A good fix here would be to use data matching technology that overcomes the issue of having data in different formats and coming from different sources. If an enterprise does decide to totally rethink the way their technology works, it needs to be a decision that’s built into top level KPIs and metrics. Software overhauls can be expensive, meaning they’re not something that can be flippantly introduced without a lot of prior planning.
In the dark about your customers?
Single customer view use cases
Sometimes it’s easier to visualize the impact of an SCV with the help of tangible goals. Here are some clearly defined ways in which an SCV can have a direct impact on key business metrics:
Mitigating financial crime risks
The more accurate the customer data or account holder information, the better an organization’s ability to carry out risk profiling. In the case of financial crime risks, this means using an SCV to remain compliant with anti-money-laundering processes, sanctions and reporting obligations. The comprehensive and unified nature of an SCV also makes it easier to identify any suspicious activity on an account.
Fraud orchestration and prevention
An SCV serves as the focal point of any fraud orchestration campaign. By providing a centralized view of a customer’s life-cycle with rich data for analysis, other tools and systems can analyze and highlight any red flags or high-risk activity. The real-time nature of an SCV also means that a fraud orchestration approach can adapt to threats and issues as they happen, while also making it possible for a user to immediately react and nullify them.
Protect citizens and break down barriers
An SCV doesn’t just help in sectors like banking, telecommunications and insurance. They can also serve as a support for governments looking to garner a 360 view of citizens. This could extend to unifying all internal databases, which in turn helps to uncover previously hidden risks in areas like public safety and defense or local governments. Cross-department collaboration is streamlined, with silos of data being eliminated thanks to the centralized nature of an SCV.
Consolidate customer complaints and support
Support requests can be time-consuming – and it’s sometimes hard to prioritize which ones need to be executed first. Consolidating various information from a customer into an SCV, a business is able to quickly identify the life cycle of their interactions. What’s more, by identifying the complaints which result in most customer churn, an enterprise can use this information to more clearly prioritize which issues need to be tackled first.
Data privacy and compliance
It’s more important than ever for organizations to ensure the data of their customers is kept safe. With so many touchpoints for a customer to interact with, having consent orchestration ensures clear parameters for what data is or isn’t available to be accessed.
Single customer view in banking and why it’s so important
While an SCV is important regardless of the sector you’re in, it can be particularly useful in an industry like banking. This is an area where ensuring clients are specifically tailored to and understood is vital. Here are some of the core ways in which an organization can achieve that in banking with the help of an SCV:
Real-time technologies which make identifying and preventing fraud can be transformative for banks looking to reduce financial loss and protect their customers. That extends to flagging possible fraudulent transactions, which could be linked to scams and theft. In an industry where protecting finances is at the core of every decision that’s made, an SCV provides the context to quickly and efficiently prevent evolving threats at scale.
Contextual monitoring prevents all kinds of financial crimes, heightening the impact and accuracy of risk monitoring, detection, investigation, and decision-making. This is particularly important in the case of preventing anti-money laundering An SCV makes it possible to immediately identify and flag any instances where this might be occurring.
Recent reports have shown that nearly 10% of all data records in the banking sector are duplicated. This leads to significant operational inefficiencies and added overhead.
One of the greatest challenges that banks face is losing customers to their rivals. An SCV gives your customer-facing teams the tools to show your customers that you understand them better than anyone else, providing them with timely and relevant customer service and outreach.
Having accurate information about your customers, their buying behaviors, social connections, channel usage and more can give your sales teams actionable insights for upsell and cross sell.
Single customer view in insurance and why it’s so important
Just as with banking, the insurance sector is another avenue where an SCV can transform the way organizations interact with their clients. By its very nature, insurance requires a lot of personal touches to ensure customers feel like they’re getting the support and guidance they want, as well as mitigating against the potential threat of fraud.
An SCV goes a long way to ensuring that’s the case:
Increase customer value
Modern customers want a simple and personalized experience when dealing with insurance firms. Striking a balance between these two important factors is made easier with the deeper understanding that an SCV provides. Insurance companies are able to quickly assess a customer’s profile, then offer benefits and discounts, as well as hyper-personalized quotes, in a matter of minutes. This streamlined approach will also extend to the claims and adjudication process.
Improved decision model accuracy and automation
Using Decision Intelligence (DI), AI is able to provide a single, unified view to help insurance professionals make faster and more accurate decisions. A modeling process is able to predict and simulate specific situations related to customers, with the AI able to either fully automate decisions or provide enough statistical evidence for a human to make a rounded and measured call.
Robust risk and fraud controls
Fraudulent claims are on the rise in the insurance sector, with it believed that as many as 10% of property casualty claims are fraudulent. In order to combat this, insurers need a contextual view of customers and their networks of relationships. This 360 view gives them the ability to investigate and monitor their activities in extreme detail, making it easier than ever to detect the risk of fraud.
Heightened cross-selling techniques
An accurate product density view across unique individuals and companies can help to identify what products are most popular with clients across different regions. This can make it easier to bundle and cross-sell products.
Hyper-personal customer discounts
The ability to recognize customers in real-time makes it possible for a website to offer dynamic pricing scales and discounts, in accordance with their existing length of service or behavioral habits. This direct quoting method has a much higher chance of conversion.
Centralized enterprise analytics
Enterprise analytics, such as ratings, loss propensity, and fraud, can be unified by bringing together a company’s historic and operational enterprise data assets.
Creation of customer reference assets
Normally, third-party and external industry data isn’t immediately at the disposal of an insurance firm. However, with an SCV it’s possible to track and log this, helping to create a very comprehensive and rounded approach to understanding all aspects of a customer.
Better due diligence
A deep connection between all aspects of a customer’s connected entities ensures that it’s easier to perform extensive due diligence in regards to factors like customer screening, credit risk, ESG, and corruption.
Single customer view in telecommunications and why it’s important
An SCV can also be transformative for those in the telecommunications industry. Whether it’s for compliance factors or to accelerate financial growth, there are a variety of ways in which utilizing one can have a massive impact.
Improve CX and grow EBITDA
An SCV can reveal new insights to drive context-rich engagement that’s personalized. It can also uncover cross-sell and upsell opportunities, helping to accelerate new customer acquisition.
Empower growth and change
Telcos need to build a trusted data foundation from a host of siloed sources. SCVs help to ensure heightened data quality for streamlined cloudification, acquisitions and divestitures, cost base transformation, and leveraging mergers.
Mitigate fraud and risk
The predictive nature of SCVs make it possible to monitor and pre-empt behaviors, ensuring that over time you’ll be able to identify suspicious activity. This serves as a pre-emptive barrier, helping to prevent fraud and mitigate potential threats to integrity.
Get a step on the competition
Ultimately, the finite management of customer accounts empowers a telecoms enterprise to pick out insights which could give them an advantage over rivals. This hyper-personalized approach to analytics provides a rounded view which could help an organization pull ahead of the competition.
Single customer view in the government and public sector and why it’s important
SCVs are not exclusive to the private sector. Those who work for public organizations, including the government, can also use them to improve performance and enable quick decision making that has an impact on a national, or even global basis.
Tax and revenue optimization. An SCV can help prevent tax avoidance, evasion and fraud by connecting internal and external data points. This provides administrators with a single view of taxpayers, which is enriched with statistical intelligence about the relationships between people, organizations and places. In turn, this highlights and flags any potential cases of evasion or misreporting.
Safeguard against grant and benefit fraud. The holistic view provided by an SCV ensures critical government programs are not exploited or misused. By identifying those who should – and shouldn’t – receive benefits and grants packages, SCVs can reveal hidden risks to make it easier to safeguard programs.
Border and customs control. SCVs can even have an impact on the national border. By providing a rounded view of internal and external data, threats and hidden risks can quickly be identified – while also ensuring compliance procedures are being followed. These systems allow customs and security agencies to assess risks, while making trusted decisions quickly to facilitate secure, frictionless movement of goods and people in real time.
How Quantexa helps organizations build a true single customer view
Quantexa helps enterprises make better, more informed decisions by capturing dispersed data and making it understandable and actionable.
We use best-in-class entity resolution to build trusted views of your customer data. We then generate graphs that find hidden connections and apply advanced analytical models to identify risks and opportunities.
Banking
Quantexa delivers an unrivaled single view of customers and counterparties. It allows banking and financial institutions to leverage better data availability for more personalized and trusted customer experiences, while enhancing privacy and security. Banks can use the latest advancements in AI to better inform digital transformation and enable more confident data-driven decisions for a digitally resilient ecosystem. Quantexa’s software is trusted by leading banks, fintechs and regulators in the fight against fraud and financial crime, protecting data privacy, and upholding regulatory compliance.
Insurance
Quantexa helps insurers connect and operationalize internal and external data for a richer and more comprehensive understanding of every applicant, customer, claimant, third-party and supplier across the value chain. When insurers have confidence through the right data and context, they can better protect against fraud risk and focus on growing their business—using a deeper customer understanding to limit customer churn, optimize pricing based on customer behavior, and discover cross-sell or upsell opportunities.
Telecommunications
Quantexa unifies disparate and ambiguous data at scale to help Telcos become more data-driven and customer-centric. Its unique and 99% accurate dynamic entity resolution allows organizations in Telecommunications to use their internal and external data for a fully rounded customer view – so they can grow revenue, optimize supply chains, operationalize ESG and implement efficient data management practices.
Government & Public sector
Quantexa delivers a fully contextualized data view that’s easy to integrate into existing systems. This enriched data helps agencies block fraud, maintain compliance, investigate crime, and improve the safe movement of people and goods. Quantexa’s secure and usable data output helps agencies foster transparency, improve reliability, and enable faster and more informed decisions to create more efficient and safer communities around the world.
FAQs
Why is it important to build a single customer view?
An SCV ensures a hyper-personalized approach to marketing, account management, and fraud & financial crime protection. It allows every team in an organization to gain access to and update customer information and provides the basis for analytics, AI and decision-making, making it quicker and easier to interact with customers with utmost accuracy and confidence. Privacy regulations are also heightened, thanks to content orchestration practices.
What is the difference between a single customer view and a 360-degree customer view?
A 360-degree customer view and a single customer view are the same thing, just under a different name. Both of these offer a detailed, rounded image of a customer or client.
What are the trends in single customer view management?
Just as with any customer interaction platforms, the SCV landscape is ever-evolving. Some of the key developing trends include heightened data augmentation through artificial intelligence and machine learning, as well as dynamic views of data.
Typically, a “one size fits all” approach is taken when building an SCV. That assumes that one view of a customer can be used for every use case within the organization. This might be feasible with only a couple of use cases, but as more parts of the organization start using the SCV, this quickly becomes unmanageable because different use cases will require different levels of data matching, which is only feasible with dynamic entity resolution.
Useful links
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