If your customer data lives in siloed data systems, you’re doing your team and perhaps more importantly, your customer a disservice. In order to capture a single, comprehensive view of the customer that addresses gaps and opportunities in your entire customer experience (CX), you need to understand what data you have, where it is being stored and how to pull it together to satisfy your various departmental stakeholders; give you a bird’s eye view. Housing all data in one place reduces customer friction and allows for more intuitive, personalized product experiences.
You’ve probably heard the term “single view of customer” (SVOC). But even if you haven’t, chances are you know what it’s like to run a financial services company without one.
Why an SVOC is worth fighting for
Convoluted and disparate data systems make it difficult to capture a complete view of your customers and the information you know about them. Whether you run a legacy financial services enterprise, or you’re part of a company that experienced major growth in a short period of time, you likely have multiple teams in your organization that use their own platforms for collecting and analyzing data without collaboration.
Almost every company has customer relationship management (CRM) software now, but how many other databases outside of your CRM have customer data that’s not being synced to it? For example, if you use Salesforce or Hubspot, you still need to sync that platform with your enterprise relationship management (ERM) system or processes where you collect information about how your customers use your products and services.
Your customers want to feel like they’re interacting with a human who knows them — especially when it comes to their financial needs. When you commit to a single view of the customer, you can target your marketing and sales efforts effectively and improve customer service and support with more personalized interactions.
Let’s say a customer visits your platform every month on the 15th (payday) to transfer $1,000 into an ETF investment. Without all your customer data in one place, you may not pick up on this pattern. But with a single view, you can flag the trend and send a more personalized message to the customer encouraging them to sign up for a monthly automatic transfer. As a result, the customer has a more efficient, personalized experience.
When all of your customer’s relevant information is housed in one place, you can help them meet their goals and you reduce customer churn. For example, while requiring a customer to update their phone number on multiple platforms may feel like a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things, presenting too many of these hurdles will cause your customer to simply drop off.
Today’s marketplace has plenty of humanized, intuitive digital solutions in fintech to choose from. Don’t make the choice any easier by failing to streamline a convoluted nest of data platforms. Here’s how to get started on a path toward a SVOC.
1. Not sure where your customer data lives? Conduct a data audit
To achieve SVOC, you need a comprehensive review of the current state of all data within your organization. A data audit is the first step toward building a single view of the customer and developing an insights practice.
Financial services companies often think they have only one or two data platforms to consolidate, but upon closer inspection, there are many more. For example, while your marketing and e-commerce team may amount to two separate data platforms, don’t forget about that third-party marketing team you hired to do outbound emails. They’re also collecting data — data that’s not being funneled back through the proper channels.
Here are the questions you should be asking yourself during your data audit:
- Where is the data?
- What is the data?
- How does the data interact?
Once you understand what the flow of the data is across your platform, it’s time to assess how to make that data work for you.
2. Define your business objectives
Too many financial services enterprises have teams collecting data without the bigger picture in mind: what are the business objectives customer data can help you meet? But a lack of communication and collaboration around these objectives can stand in the way of your company meeting them.
These siloed departments aren’t trying to undermine each other, per se. But sometimes one team’s business objectives appear different enough from another’s that it feels easier to implement a new platform rather than use what’s already out there.
When your company defines its cross-departmental business’s objectives, it becomes clearer to your teams how to make the most of customer data, and which customer data software will best support them.
3. Collaborate to ensure an enterprise solution works for all stakeholders
It’s time to find a customer data platform that helps everyone reach your overarching business goals. And it’s not as hard as you may think to find a CDP that fits the bill for everybody. Your e-commerce team may need eight more fields than the marketing team does in order to personalize the customer experience. However, if both teams are working toward the common goal of growing top-line revenue, it doesn’t matter how they use the CDP, so long as they can rely on it for all their data needs.
Don’t assume you will need to eliminate your CRM
The goal with SVOC isn’t to narrow your data systems down to a single CDP — it’s to get the data in sync to achieve a single view. For example, your CRM will likely remain whether you implement a CDP or not.
Your CRM is a foundational tool used by the majority of your organization. The data it stores can be bidirectional. When you update your CRM, your CDP software will automatically update as well.
A digital financial services consultancy can streamline your data
Whether you’re a legacy financial institution or a mid-size company struggling to keep up with your customer needs, partnering with a third party can help you simplify and modernize your customer data. A digital financial services consultancy gives you an at-a-glance view of where your data lives and how it interacts across the organization’s other data sources. With this insight, you will have a better sense of how to optimize that data with the right solution to meet your goals.
Once your data is streamlined, you’re on your way to improved ROI and customer satisfaction. Do you feel like your data is all over the place? O3 can help.