At its core, a single customer view is a way for decision-makers to identify – and ultimately segment – customers according to specific classifications. The goal is that by better understanding the intricacies of individual customers, you can tailor their experience and make it more personal, which will ultimately turn them into repeat buyers. 

Getting a ‘single view of the customer’ involves bringing together all the information on a customer across the organisation into one place to create a complete view of them. That view encompasses who they are, their behaviour, the products they use, how they use them and their interactions with the organisation.

How exactly can having a single customer view help deliver a better customer experience? It's essential to recognise that what different areas of your business may see as separate interactions are not seen that way by new or current customers. For customers, it's about experiencing a seamless experience that evolves with each interaction. Therefore, your organisation must adopt this customer-centric perspective. Having a single customer view becomes instrumental in achieving this goal. 

By consolidating all customer data into a unified view, organisations can gather a comprehensive understanding of each customer's preferences, behaviours, and interactions. This can help to deliver a more personalised and seamless customer experience. Having a single customer view can directly influence CX in several important ways:

1. Allows for the identification of new opportunities and patterns to better target your customers.
2. Helps increase the efficiency in interactions with customers, in effect allowing them to be quicker and more purposeful.
3. Provides rich data for analysis and training of data models.

The biggest barrier to creating a single customer view is often the presence of data silos within an organisation, compounded by issues of data duplication and quality. These challenges often emerge due to disparate systems and departments storing customer data independently within an organisation. 

Upon, implementing Match Cloud, some of our clients have discovered as much as a 40% duplication in their customer data. Consider the disparity in the customer experience when they contact that company. Depending on which record a company representative may access, they may have all the information or only disparate pieces of customer data. Moreover, for potential customers, imagine their confusion when they are presented with two different offers from the same organisation due to duplicate records from separate sources.

Some Match Cloud clients have discovered tens of thousands of issues across their data once it was all brought together. And these data issues were affecting their ability to serve their customers. But with the functionality and data-parsing capabilities of Match Cloud, those challenges transformed into opportunities to enhance the CX.

For organisations, the ambition of creating a single customer view is often seen as a daunting task, requiring extensive time, resources, and expertise. However, establishing a single customer view has become more accessible than ever before thanks to innovative platforms such as Match Cloud.Match Cloud is Deloitte’s all-in-one end-to-end data management platform that enables organisations to realise a single view of their customers. Match Cloud provides the flexibility and extensibility of a Customer Data Platform (CDP) while retaining all the scope of a Master Data Management (MDM) platform. The capabilities of Match Cloud allow organisations to achieve the single customer view through these capabilities:

• Sourcing data from multiple systems including legacy applications, cloud apps, and third-party data sources.
• Cleansing data across multiple channels using drag and drop functionalities to set quality rules.
• Removing duplicates and inconsistencies using cleansing, matching and survivorship modules.
• Building reports and dashboards to provide real-time insights and analytics.
• Enabling real-time sharing which allows for easy access of information across teams.

At its core, Match Cloud can be used for a variety of valuable outcomes – from creating the single customer view data model, through to the platform’s data model builder, to integrating customer data from different systems via API connectors.

In addition, Match Cloud has job orchestration tools, automated data matching and cleansing. Organisations can also take advantage of exception management when handling customer records with poor or incomplete data, or partial matches that require business-user intervention.