What do you interpret as a Single Customer View or SCV? You only have to search through the internet, literature, and marketing materials from vendors to realize that the concept of an SCV is a fuzzy-edged and somewhat amorphous thing, just like your actual customer master data perhaps?

One solution vendor describes it as “a method for gathering all the data about your prospects and clients and merging it into a single record“, they also might describe it as a ‘360’, ‘360 degree’ or ‘unified’ customer view. But this all assumes that you know the position from which you’re looking at the customer and the business purpose that you have in mind.

The assumption in some instances is that the Single Customer View is composed primarily of first-party data, in other words, data gathered by the many functions of a given business during the course of transactions and various market engagements.

However, when the first-party data is combined with supplementary data from third parties who have anonymized datasets that can be attached to those same customer records by data relationships like physical address, that customer record becomes infinitely more valuable and is able to be categorized for uses that are potentially more useful, valuable and meaningful for different business activities.

The challenge today, across many organizations is that the customer entity record is often not held in just one place. It is often purposefully held in systems that have very specific functions that have customer records either as a focus or necessary side aspect of their function. As a consequence, having and in fact, maintaining a unified view and understanding of the customer is quite challenging.

Consider a bank, for example, that maintains the customer master records for mortgages and bonds, separately from brokerage, savings, credit card, checking, and loan accounts. It is not inconceivable that for regular transaction processing, that same bank, has at least five or more customer master records for ostensibly the same person. In some countries, these can be connected using a national identity number like an SSN, but in many instances, this is not a requirement for the establishment of the account – any legitimate state, province, or government-issued identity document might suffice.

For those organizations and traders that are unregulated the problem might be that the only tenuous relationship that might exist between the marketing, inventory, and billing systems might be an email address, a phone number, or a delivery address depending on the level of integration between systems and the relative maturity of the organization’s data management practices.

Pretectum seeks to resolve these types of challenges by supporting a number of different approaches to customer MDM in whatever way makes the most sense for the business. These approaches include a hub and spoke deployment where the MDM is a collation point for the customer entity from one or more systems or as a derived golden record master record that can be used as a cross-referencing or search index point for multiple systems to reduce the proliferation of duplicate records.

Ultimately, Pretectum’s CMDM could also serve as your origination system, supporting the establishment and immutable authority on the most complete description of the customer record for transactional and reference purposes and a true golden record that is originated and managed centrally and syndicated to all systems as and when appropriate.

If your choice is to include aggregations and summations of data and external identifiers from other platforms and systems, that is entirely at your discretion. The main thing is that you have the customer master data that you need, continuously curated and fit for your business purposes no matter how diverse those purposes may be.