Why Your Brand Should Strive for the Golden Customer Record

By 2020, it’s estimated that 1.7MB of data will be created every second for every person on earth. With this rapid creation of data, compiling and maintaining an accurate customer record has become increasingly more important.

But brands aren’t only dealing with the influx of data created — they also have to contend with where it is being stored. More data than ever is inaccurate, disparate, and maintained in siloed systems. When it comes to an individual customer record, the information about a single person that lives inside your organization, it is challenging to keep that information intact and up to date. While many enterprises do their best to achieve a single customer view, ultimately the process of updating and organizing that information isn’t as efficient as we’d like.

This problem prohibits brands from providing consistent customer experiences and stops them from creating compelling consumer engagement. A staggering 96% of marketers struggle with data collection and point to building a comprehensive single view of a customer as their biggest challenge.

Simply put, the golden customer record is a compilation of the addressable identifiers associated with an individual that is then enriched with accurate insights about that person. These identifiers — phone number, email address, social handle, postal address — are the first step to creating an accurate profile. However, those pieces of information may live in different systems, used by sales, or marketing, or customer support teams to engage with customers. With no way to stitch those data points together, communications to customers can be contradictory and misinformed.

Achieving the Golden Customer Record

For a single source of truth about an individual customer, brands need to use an identity graph to combine and maintain customer information. This technology, built from sophisticated algorithms, stores all offline and online identifiers that correlate with individuals. Brands can further enrich their records with third-party data for a more complete picture of a person.

By establishing a single digital identity for a person and enriching it with professional, affinity, and behavioral data, you can begin to develop a stronger relationship with individual customers.

For instance, a department store chain can use social affinities and data-driven segmentation to prioritize high-value customers of shoe apparel. Engagement strategies can be organized dynamically around customer affinities to offer discounts based on how they communicate on social about their favorite shoe brands or recent transactions for an upcoming trip.

This type of data collection and real-time maintenance is a competitive advantage for brands that are leveling up their customer experience strategy. Thanks to advances in machine learning and other techniques, companies using an identity graph and identity resolution gain insight into:

• Who their customers are as an individual in their professional and personal lives
• How their customers engage with brands
• What interests their customers may have
• Their customers’ preferred channels of engagement
• Predictions of future purchases and intent to buy

Once you have a golden record in place, you can begin creating a better experience for your customers with personalization across the buyer’s journey and strengthen the one-to-one interactions you have with consumers.

Ready to create a golden customer record for every individual in your database? Learn more about how identity resolution and a patented identity graph can help.