A Single Customer View (SCV) in Customer Service: Explained

Today, customers have access to endless touchpoints and can communicate with businesses via a combination of channels, from traditional phone calls to more advanced options such as chatbots. However, as the accessibility of communication tools rapidly increases, the more difficult it becomes for businesses to keep up with conversation threads while simultaneously building extensive customer profiles to offer the best service.

Creating a single customer view could be the ideal solution for contact centres of all kinds, whether you’re a start-up or a large company. So let’s dive into what this means, the benefits, potential challenges and how to build a single customer view.

Being able to view customer information and data in a centralised database brings several benefits for your customers and your customer service team. Find out the main advantages below.

Easily accessible data

When a customer’s data is accessed from a single location, the amount of time it takes your customer representatives to find key information is drastically reduced. Whether they need to locate a previous conversation or a full transaction history, being able to see it all in one place means your team can spend less time digging around in databases and more time helping customers.

Facilitating deduplication

Another important benefit is the ability to merge duplicate messages about the same problem into a single interaction. This allows the query to be answered by one agent all at once, instead of requiring multiple agents. For example, it means a Facebook message can be merged with an email from the same customer, if both sent within a 12-hour period.

Deliver personalised cross-channel marketing

The more you know about your customers, the easier it is to provide a personalised service. Businesses with a single customer view can easily see things like marketing preferences, past transactions, previous conversations and demographics which can help you deliver tailored marketing.

This deeper understanding is crucial for businesses wanting to personalise their interactions with their customers. In turn, tailored products, services and communications can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty while also leading to bigger profits for the business.

Gain a better understanding of customers

Without a single customer view, it can be tricky to know how to handle each customer’s needs and preferences. When your team can view customer information in one place, it can be much easier to build up a profile for each customer. This means representatives won’t need to ask questions that the customer has already answered in a previous interaction and limits customer frustrations around handling time.

Before you begin building a single customer view, your team should take a journey-based view of customer interactions. Consider the end-to-end journey for customers across your channels rather than thinking about each individual touchpoint. Once you’ve started to do this, you can begin putting together the pieces required to create a single customer view. The goal is to understand your customers’ present and past moves and the non-linear path they often take before being able to accurately predict them for your SCV.

Building a single customer view isn’t always smooth sailing. Whether you’re yet to integrate omnichannel communications or have a disjointed approach to analytics, everything must be tidied up before creating your single customer view.

Siloed data, data inaccuracies and legacy infrastructure are the three biggest challenges faced when creating a single customer view. Below, we’ll explain these obstacles in more depth and suggest a few ways for businesses to overcome these issues.

Data siloes

One of the biggest issues you might face is data siloes. Each team typically has its own silo of data which is processed using unique procedures that work for them. If this is the case, bringing it all together in one place can be a difficult task. Finding a solution that everybody agrees on can also be a tricky hurdle to overcome.

Consolidating your data might be time-consuming depending on how disjointed your data currently is. You’ll need to convince your teams to bring everything together and come to an agreement on how data will be stored with your single customer view. Bringing customisation available with Gnatta into the mix can help persuade staff that this will be a better and more efficient method of accessing customer data.

Data inaccuracies & inconsistencies

When customer information is scattered across databases, it can end up being duplicated, disconnected, decayed or distrusted. This leads to inaccuracies and inconsistencies that can be hard to fix. If data is suspected to be inaccurate or multiple copies of customer data exist with inconsistent details, it might be necessary to contact the customer for the most up-to-date information. This way, you can be sure that nothing is incorrect as you build your single customer view.

Data overload

A drawback can actually be data overload. The data pulled into view needs to be relevant and useful – or the agent will spend all their time trying to read everything instead of resolving the problem quickly.

Legacy infrastructure

Lots of businesses have legacy communication software and are reluctant to switch to something different. However, these systems are often disjointed and contribute to data siloes. More importantly, older infrastructure doesn’t tend to offer a single customer view for businesses.

When legacy infrastructure is heavily relied on, it can be difficult to gain buy-in from stakeholders and your staff. To overcome this, you’ll need to understand the benefits of building a SCV and the communication software you intend to deploy.

Humans can easily remember a big chunk of interactions with others over time. So, when we’re in dialogue, we have a whole bank of memory that we can rely on to empathise, give advice and, essentially, have a meaningful conversation. But when we speak to somebody for the first time and have no access to information on their background, the conversation is usually very different, and the relationship will take time to build. When it comes to customer-facing roles, these scenarios can lead to different experiences for customers with varying levels of satisfaction.

This can be solved by implementing communication software offering a single customer view. The fact is that to effectively communicate with customers there needs to be a full understanding of exactly who they are, what their relationship has been with your company so far, what they do and don’t like and, ultimately, what their sentimental value is. With communication software that delivers a single customer view for any channel, including inbound and outbound calls, information on customers can be consolidated in one place.

Call centre agents can use software such as Gnatta to access a single customer view which provides them with a centralised view of each customer’s data. From this, they can have relevant, meaningful dialogue with their customers.

Here at Gnatta, we understand that no two businesses are the same. Therefore, we prioritise the need for customisation when it comes to communication software. And the best bit? This can be achieved without the involvement of developers, keeping things quick, efficient and simple for your team and their customers.

With our SaaS, a wide array of communication features can be customised in minutes to offer your ideal omnichannel experience tailored to the channels offered and the number of customers your business deals with. As a result, your teams can benefit from the things that matter most.

Below are some of the customisations available with our single customer view software:

• Customer service priorities
• Query routing by multiple criteria
• Variable automated responses combined with a knowledge recall base
• Dynamic agent scripting
• Open API integrations into any internal or external system
• Proactive customer notifications based on new products, recalls, etc.

A single customer view can seem challenging at first when dealing with things like siloed data and legacy infrastructure, but we hope this guide has shed some light on the benefits it can have for your business and demonstrates the value of gathering customer data in one place.