If you’re embarking on a single view of customer strategy, stop!

The ‘single-view-of-customer’ is born

For decades, business leaders yearned to solve their single view of customer challenges.  

“If only we had all our customer information in one place, we’d add rocket fuel to sales and marketing,” they’d declare. 

“We’d be able to personalise our products and services,” they’d evangelise. 

“Our business units and functions are siloed. They’re all missing customer opportunities. And this is happening every single day,” they’d state sadly. 

Some of these leaders did a great job. Through sheer drive and persistence, they cajoled business stakeholders into approving the funding needed to solve the challenge. Their single-view-of-customer initiative was realised and launched to much fanfare with a fancy tagline (e.g. #customer360, #customerfirst, #nextgenhub, #customerhub, #one #c1).  

Once up and running, these initiatives often worked well for smaller organisations. But for others, it would only take months for things to start going wrong. Why? 

The issues begin

These single-view-of-the-customer technology solutions often had problems, including privacy, technical scalability (or lack thereof), and cost scalability issues.  

However, the core issue for most was that each company's siloed business units and functions had vastly different customer needs. For example, the sales department's needs differed from those of the finance department. So, any single view of the whole business was a massive and unwieldy amalgamation of customer information. And no matter the angle at which it was viewed, the huge new conglomeration of customer data appeared bloated. 

A bloated view of the customer

So, a single view of the customer is also a bloated view of the customer. 

Why is this a problem? A bloated view of the customer is obviously challenging to manage from a data architecture perspective, but this pales into insignificance when considering the political challenges resulting from the bloat.  

Politics? When attempting to consume or change the new bloated view of customer information, leaders across different business units and functions must battle out who controls the view. And each department will have its own spin on it. These political control wranglings can quickly pour sand into the engines of business operations and business change.  

So, even if you’re determined enough to push through the other issues and finally deliver the new single-view-of-customer solution, you may find that it results in universal frustration, infighting, and slower progress than expected – despite the significant investment.  

A better way

Luckily, there are now much better ways to integrate and deliver high-value customer information to fuel sales and marketing.

Event-driven architecture empowers all previously siloed business units to leverage customer insights, improve customer service, and identify new customer opportunities — without the need to wrangle who controls what. It also provides real-time customer insights into product development and service delivery.

So, if you’re embarking on a single-view-of-customer strategy, STOP. Before you do anything, contact us to discuss how event-driven architecture will save you a lot of grief.