Catalyst towards BIG DATA - Need for “Single View of Customer” -SVOC

“Organizations typically have customer data spread across many systems. It is fragmented and often inconsistent. This makes it difficult for organizations to understand the true value of customers, their likely behavior, their needs, and also the risks associated with them. Without a single view of those customers, organizations are in the dark and cannot effectively retain customers, cross-sell to them, deliver the right customer experience to them, or manage the risk associated with them. Some form of single customer view is, therefore, fundamental to managing customer relationships.”—Gartner, “Creating the Single Customer View with Customer Data Integration,” by John Radcliffe

Enterprises today are looking for ways to better recognize their customers to enhance the business share with target marketing and solution offerings that would enable to retain them from competition. Organizations are persistent in introducing more personalized and ever delightful experience to customers and offering products which are value differentiators to augment revenues. 

But, this entire endeavor is in vain when you don’t know the real who (customer)? Because when multiple profiles of the same customer exists non-standardized, un-cleansed and incomplete across multiple channels it complicates the situation. In the age of multiple functional applications, state of the art and legacy platforms, heterogeneous environments and most of all slack integration and governance regimes; the chances of customer information being inconsistent across channels and business units is prevalent. 

Hence enterprises need to understand the root causes of these problems and look for enterprise wide solution which first addresses the consolidation of this information to create Single View of Customer [SVOC]

The market dynamics which drive Single view of Customer Master Data are identified and defined below; these are classified as primary driving forces. We believe that there are certain auxiliary forces as well which are situation and business dependent and are not detailed here:

1. Regulatory Compliance is a key driver and the most forceful need for SVOC, as every industry is driven by some watch dog directive that is a do-or-pay situation
2. Then we have mature and more advanced competition as enterprises act more globally and go transnational in defining customer handling strategy and approach in every domain of business. Mergers & Acquisitions defines gargantuan data challenges and organizations starve to resolve them as the problem ranges across information ownership, process and people
3. Subsequently, we have Consumer behavior, as the culture of conducting business is changing at amazing pace in last four decades the consumer’s interest and service expectations from the organizations have also changed in big leaps going from store based systems to near real-time online needs.

A successful SVOC implementation not only helps to retain profitable customers but also addresses challenges of any enterprise to grow its customer base. The customer base growth opportunity comes from multiple avenues as follows:

• Accurate and complete customer data let the enterprise to leverage various cross sell and up sell opportunities.
• SVOC solution that contains information about prospects allows enterprises to increase their prospect-to-customer conversion proportion, thus increasing the customer base.
• MDM’s ability to discover and understand the complete picture of current and complete relationships allow an enterprise to create a targeted set of marketing campaigns and products and services offers that may prove to be more cost effective and demonstrate higher lift than traditional mass marketing

In short SVOC has lead to a transformation of moving enterprises to customer centric business models and is truly revolutionary albeit “common sense” based approach to drastically improve the enterprise business landscape