When approaching the subject of a Single Customer View (SCV), you’re going to encounter a very wide range of views.

In 2016, a new form of technology, christened the Customer Data Platform, started to gain a lot of attention in the marketing world for its ability to connect disparate data sources, such as a brand's CRM, email, marketing automation and eCommerce platforms, and do away with data silo issues. Essentially, a Customer Data Platform (CDP) will centralize all customer data, unify that data into a Single Customer View, and then enable you to push it to whatever execution or analysis tool needs it.

Over the years, marketers have bought, replaced and re-bought countless technologies with the aim of delivering 1-to-1 customer experiences. The different marketing platforms each help to store customer data, deliver insights to the business, and transfer the information to the marketing, sales and customer services teams, to aid their ability to deliver optimal customer experiences that drive more revenue.

The problem with acquiring new technologies, however, is that each new platform you add to your technology stack will create these silos of data, but also create silos of insights and a siloed way of executing a message or experience to the customer. When you consider that there are over 8,000+ marketing technologies to choose from (social media, content management, mobile, advertising etc), and that a marketing team may use as many as 40 tools to manage customer data, over time we've created a mass of silos everywhere.

At Christmas time retailers will find they have an absolute deluge of customer data coming in. Names, email addresses, postal codes, product preferences, purchase and card details, real-time behavioral insights, delivery preferences – that’s a lot of stuff to store and process. If you’re not careful, you’ll end up in a festive jumble with money being wasted all over the shop at a time of year when profit really counts.

A really interesting research piece from Gartner, called ‘Distilling Marketer Adoption, Views and Misperceptions of Customer Data Platforms’, reveals the results from a survey of 504 marketers. The researchers found that 51% of respondents claimed that their Customer Data Platform (CDP) was their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.

As the report states, “this misperception of a CDP as a CRM solution reflects a lack of appreciation for the advantages that many CDPs have over heritage CRM applications. These include scale, profile unification, segmentation and connection to marketing systems.”

Most marketers would agree that creating targeted campaigns based on clean, deduplicated customer data is a highly effective way of improving your marketing efforts. But when you ask the average marketer what their biggest problems are, you can be sure that a lack of clean, useable data will be nearly always be at the top of their list.