The Other Significant Single Customer View

There has been much talk of the Single Customer View these last 18 months - about providing a seamless and uniform experience for customers across all devices, platforms and touchpoints (OmniChannel)- and how it’s an essential part of any successful modern business. The Single Customer View is best illustrated by Netflix - where you initiate your customer journey on one device and then continue on a variety of devices - starting a film on your smartphone on the commute, then continuing on your tablet or laptop when you get home, and finally finishing it off on your big screen TV. For retailers this process can be even more involved, taking in various in-store kiosks and other point-of-sale devices. The key principle throughout though is to provide the customer with the same uniform experience and same recognisable interface - at every point in the customer journey.

The truth is that there are actually three types of ’Single Customer View’, as follows:

1. Single Customer View for End User: Uniform, seamless customer experience - as described above
2. Single Customer View for Business Owner: Uniform, seamless overview of All of an individual customer’s activities - the main focus of this article
3. Single Customer View per Digital Business Discipline: Single, uniform overview of all key customer data-points relating to a specific admin job function - e.g. Marketing or Retail / Commercial Manager

Currently, most businesses rely on a plethora of disparate solutions to provide them with their required functionality. Using as their starting point a CMS, Ecommerce system or even Blogging platform like WordPress. To deliver their complete solution, these companies are overly reliant on 3rd party plugins or bolt-ons which are integrated on top of the core solution. There are significant financial and operational overheads in running a digital business in this manner. A key problem with plugins is that you are never really in control of them - they get updated on their own schedule and your integrations and use thereof frequently breaks therfore. Another major consideration is the data and databases, as when you use disparate systems, you typically need additional processes and resources to streamline the data - and most importantly - streamline the User Account Databases.

When we started work for BBC Worldwide many years ago now, they were running as many as a dozen different systems - each with its own user database. As a result, the admin staff spent most of their time simply just trying to ensure that everything still connected and worked, as well as de-duping the many databases of multiple copies of the same user account on each of the different systems. In short, the staff were spending the majority of their time and resources just maintaining the business and had little or no time to innovate.

Our own Digital Business Solution - the Affino Social Commerce Platform tackles the Single Customer View by creating a wholly unified Digital Front-end. Which is a result of Affino being a uniform hybrid platform which combines CMS, Ecommerce, Media, Sales and Marketing Automation, Social Interaction, CRM and Analytics into a singular powerful system. Affino is extremely apt at integrating with 3rd party systems too, at its core though, it does not really need them.

Affino truly has a singular user database which controls and contains all customer interactions and activities with the resulting digital business. Whoever implements Affino benefits immediately from a more powerful customer overview and a simpler management overhead. More time can be spent on innovating and developing the business versus just maintaining its status quo. As indicated in the above screencap, Affino gives business owners unique insights into the full range of their customers’ activities.

Affino provides, tracks and analyses all the following customer activities (which we’ve limited to a sampler of 75):

• Abandoned Basket
• Account Update
• Archived Content and Media
• Badges Awarded
• Bookmarks
• Cancelled Purchase
• Comment
• Contact List
• Contact Note
• Content Subscription Update
• Content Subscriptions
• Content Views / Various
• Contracts
• Conversion Funnel
• Credits
• Customer Ladder
• Design Centre/ Implementation
• Digital Assets / Media
• Downloads
• Ecard (send)
• Engagement Points
• External Media Viewed
• Facebook Expiry
• Facebook / Twitter Connection Added
• Form Entry
• Forum Answer
• Forum Post
• Friend Bought from Invite
• Friend Invite
• Friend Registered from Invite
• Item Added to Basket
• Item Added to Wishlist
• Jobs applied for
• Joining a Group / Collaboration
• Latest Activity
• Latest Spend
• Latest Views
• Leads / Lead Management
• Login
• Mailing List Signup
• Mailing List Unsubscribe
• Manage Live Shopping Basket
• Media Added to Channel
• Message Open
• Message Read
• Message Send
• My Message Send
• Online Directory Entry
• Opportunity Opened
• Opportunity Won
• Order / Payment Status
• Password Change
• Pledge / Funding
• Poll Entry
• Purchase
• Recent Content Views
• Registration
• Reviews
• Search / Product Search
• SEO / Keywords / Taxonomy Manager
• Share
• Site Search
• Specific Channel Viewed
• Specific Media Viewed
• Specific Section Viewed
• Specific Standard Item Viewed
• Standard Content Added to Channel
• Status Update
• Store Credits
• Tasks
• Test Taken
• Top / Total Views
• Total Content Views
• Total Followers
• Total Points
• Total Spend
• Zone Views

The point of all of this is that all the main customer activities are run and managed by a single system, which inherently provides Single Customer Views for both end-customers and site owners / admins alike. There are far fewer overheads - in both operational and financial terms, and significant efficiency and productivity gains. And as everything is integral, there is no risk of Cookie Armageddon - that is to say Privacy Protector tools - disabling cookies and removing 3rd party plugins.

For a Successful Digital Business - having a seamless, single, manageable site admin customer view is pretty much as essential as providing the Single Customer View to the end consumer. It just so happens that Affino naturally and natively delivers both.

For further information speak to our CCO Jonathan Collins on +44 (0)20 3393 3240 | jonathan.collins@affino.com