Ron Shevlin, on his ‘Marketing Whims’ blog, blogged about single view of a customer being a ‘marketing myth’. ‘
Ron - My take: Truth is, most companies don’t know what a single view of the customer is, and many place way too much value in the concept.
Looking at it from a pure marketing point of view, I’d say ‘maybe’. I think Ron focuses in his article a bit too much on the data rather than the applications of that data.
It would be foolish to give a CSR access to every data element available, as Ron suggests, but having all that information ready to provide the CSR with the appropriate action to take is a much better way of doing it. (It still relies on having somewhere near to a single view of the customer. At least, it absolutely requires a single record for each customer, even if the integration of all systems is not included. ) If there is a way of measuring the the results of the decision made then even better – so this can be fed back into the analytic model that provided the action to take in the first place.
Also, there are non-marketing requirements for a single view of the customer- in the sales to delivery process, pretty much everywhere in a bank, especially in investment banks between the front, middle and back offices. Within these processes are very strong arguments for the development and maintenance of a single view of the customer in most organisations.
