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How to Enhance CX with Customer Data Unification
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Learn why implementing customer data unification is so important for improving the customer experience – and how to make it work for your business.
Guest contributor
Implementing customer data unification is one of the smartest moves you can make when you’re aiming to take advantage of advanced marketing strategies. If you’re looking to deliver a genuinely enhanced customer experience, making sure you have all your customer data aligned is vital. In this article, we’ll explore what customer data unification is, why it’s so important, and how to make it work for your business.
Are data unification and integration the same thing?
Data unification and integration are related but the terms describe different processes. Data integration involves collecting data from disparate sources and storing it in a central repository such as a data warehouse or lake. It involves implementing ETL processes (ETL stands for extract, transform, load) so that different types of data can be brought together and stored in a suitable format. Learn how unifying customer data into a single source of truth enhances customer experience (CX), personalization, audience segmentation, and customer lifetime value.
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The goal of data unification, on the other hand, is to keep everything about the data consistent across the whole range of business operations. It's about making sure any team member can access reliable data for all kinds of purposes including:
Email marketing campaigns.
Billing systems.
Customer service.
Developing attribution models.
Planning social media ads.
Cross-channel marketing.
While data integration is a principal focus when you're modernizing legacy systems such as in mainframe to cloud migration, data unification concerns how the data is used overall.
Now let's take a closer look at the data unification process and how you can use it to build complete customer profiles that make for a superior customer experience all round.
How to unify your customer data
The objective with data unification is to create a single source of truth. Take the following specific steps to develop customer IDs that help you generate valuable insights to strengthen your marketing campaigns.
1) Establish your data sources
The first stage is to determine all the disparate systems your data comes from. This could include digital marketing channels like social media platforms, as well as tools such as your CRM. Be sure to consider marketing data, online transactions, and customer interactions as key data sources. Customers interact with your business across multiple channels—such as online stores, social media, and in-store visits—generating valuable data for unification. Even if you don’t already use dedicated customer management software, think about all of your existing operational systems. If you run email campaigns, for instance, you may already have a well-curated list of many of your current customers.
Remember that the goal at this point is to unearth formatting inconsistencies. It could be that the same customers have slightly different versions of their names stored in your email list and in your physical address records. The success of your unification efforts will depend on standardizing every element of the data so it can be matched.
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2) Clean up the data
Data cleansing is a key part of the process, involving tidying up information to ensure accurate matching and high data quality. Data validation and data profiling are essential steps to assess the structure, quality, and content of your data, helping to identify anomalies, missing values, dirty data, and inconsistent data that can impact data accuracy. Data transformation is used to standardize data formats, fix errors, and integrate data from multiple sources, making sure all information is consistent and reliable.
Because data is generated continuously in real time, maintaining data accuracy and cleaning your data will be an ongoing process. But you can streamline this process by applying a unified data model. To do this, it’s best to integrate your data centrally.
3) Integrate the data onto one central platform
Getting all the information together in a single location makes it much more straightforward to manage. To improve operational efficiency, it is essential to integrate data from various systems and focus on consolidating data from multiple sources. Centralizing customer databases from various systems leads to better management and more accurate insights. It’s also the only way to ensure your business intelligence is of a high enough standard to reap the benefits of data-driven marketing.
Automation is key. Ideally, you should invest in a CRM or similar data management platform if you don’t already. Tools like these give you more control over the data and simplify the task of getting it ready for the customer data unification process.
For businesses relying on customer bookings or scheduling, integrating data from tools like TIMIFY ensures that appointment history, preferences, and interactions are synced into the unified customer profile. This allows for more tailored follow-ups, better personalization, and improved customer experience.
4) Create unified customer profiles
The final step is to assign every customer a unique customer ID, which you use to build a unified customer profile. Each profile holds all the information you have on the customer, from basic facts like their name, address and phone number to more business-specific information such as their buying habits and preferred communication channels. Unified customer profiles provide both a unified view and a comprehensive view of each customer, enabling better decision-making and personalized experiences. The use of master data is essential for creating accurate and consistent profiles across all systems. Managing unified customer profiles also requires careful attention to data lineage, data governance, and data security to ensure compliance, data quality, and protection of sensitive information.
It’s a complex job, though, so it’s best to use dedicated customer data platforms to execute it. These use a mixture of deterministic matching and probabilistic matching.
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Deterministic matching: finds an exact match between records. Brings together known data points from different sources like purchase history, social media interactions, or customer management platforms.
Probabilistic matching: checks for similarity between different records. The algorithm compares values in separate fields between two records and assigns them weights to estimate the likelihood of them being a match.
Marketers have used probabilistic matching for quite a few years, for most of that time by applying traditional statistical techniques. However, in an era when AI templates and machine learning have come to the fore, it should be no surprise that many companies now use AI-powered decision making tools to make the matching process more efficient.
Once you’ve set up your customer profiles, all you need to do is make sure you have some method of making the data accessible to whoever needs to use it.
A good approach is to put a reverse ETL process in place. And what is reverse ETL? Well, it’s like ETL but in the opposite direction. Instead of extracting the data, then transforming it and loading it into your data warehouse, you’re taking the data from the warehouse and loading it into your operational systems as and when required.
This ensures that even as new data is being generated, it’s continuously updated and available in real time. Overall, this can have a huge impact on the efficiency of customer relationship management.
Why is customer data unification important for CX?
To deliver top-tier customer experiences, you have to know your customers well. The better you understand them, the higher your customer satisfaction scores will be.
This approach is at the heart of customer centric marketing, which prioritizes the needs and preferences of customers to foster loyalty and improve business outcomes. Here are a few reasons why customer data unification has a huge impact on CX.
Makes identification of customer preferences easier
How long do your customers take to make a commitment to purchase? What are their favorite social channels? Do they prefer email contact or SMS? What interests do they have?
These kinds of customer insights help you plan everything from your marketing strategy to product development. Without joined-up data, you can easily go wrong by, say, sending numerous emails to someone who never reads them.
If you have unified profiles, you can avoid the problem of fragmented customer data and make sure you're reaching your customers where and when they prefer. This means you'll get more conversions from loyal customers and a significant increase in average customer lifetime value.
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Implementing a centralized web portal for accessing unified customer data can further enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of your CX strategies. This portal acts as a single point of access for all team members, ensuring seamless collaboration and decision-making based on accurate and up-to-date information.
Helps with audience segmentation
Data unification is crucial to make the most of audience segmentation. You can divide your customers into much more specific groups when you have a lot of information about them. In turn, this gives you opportunities to do more in-depth analysis.
For example, instead of simply dividing your customer base by simple demographic metrics like age or location, you could take a different approach to marketing altogether. You could create subgroups of customers according to how frequently they make purchases, and develop different marketing tailored to each group.
Supports increased personalization
Delivering personalized experiences is one of the best ways of boosting customer retention. Truly personalizing the customer experience means understanding each customer pain point as well as the individual customer traits that give rise to different expectations.
Moreover, with the rise in digital commerce and the increasing trend of ordering online, unified customer data becomes even more critical for tailoring personalized experiences across various channels.
Let's imagine you want to mount a cross-channel marketing campaign for your short-term rental business. If you have well-unified data, you'll be able to complete a short-term rental analysis and apply those learnings to craft effective and personalized messages across a variety of platforms. Or you could send precisely targeted emails about selected products to customers who have browsed ads for them elsewhere.
