Creating the golden record: 4 tips for a single customer view

Any savvy business owner will tell you how important it is to know your customers. The more you know about your customers’ desires and needs, as well as what they don’t want, the better poised your organization will be to sell them more goods or services.

Not only do you need a golden record database for your own marketing, you will likely need to have this data available to provide to any consumer who asks what information you’ve collected on them.

Developing a database of golden record contacts allows you to achieve a single customer view, per Data Services, Inc. With that in mind, here are four tips to a single customer view that you can start implementing today.

1. Be consent-positive and collect first-party data from each customer

One of the most basic tasks that some business owners forget about or ignore is the process of asking customers (and potential customers) for contact information. That’s what you use to start your database.

There are many approaches. For example, invite them to join a loyalty program to earn rewards. Request their email address to send them coupons or announcements about sales. The contact form on your web page can automatically help you gather much of this information.

2. Instruct your teams on best practices for soliciting information from customers

It’s in your team’s best interest to know more information about customers and to help the company principals leverage this data. For example, if you routinely ask people what ZIP code or city they came from when visiting your store, you can get an idea of demographic interest in your business.

Perhaps it will be time to expand with a branch office in a new city, to better meet demand. But you won’t know who is coming from what location or how many individuals are stopping by unless you make a point of asking. This is just one small example of how a simple exchange of information can lead to big business moves. So, from email inquiries to phone calls to chat sessions facilitated through your website, make a point of asking for information so you can build the database.

3. Eliminate duplicates

It’s essential to get rid of multiple copies of the same information for individual customers. To clean up your database, you’ need to merge and match records. For example, Steve J. and Steve Jones might be the same person, especially when you see their phone numbers are identical in your records.

4. Have people manually review records for quality control

Not all data is created equally. Some information might be more suspect than others, for example. Where did this data come from? Is it really accurate? You might spot discrepancies in the data, such as the person’s name spelled slightly differently, or the wrong city according to the ZIP code, and so on. In many cases, you’ll need to opt for manually intervening in the database, as noted by DQ Global.

If the system is not very reliable for records such as people’s date of birth, you can use workflow manager toolkit to automatically search for and categorize records deemed inconsistent, and then they will be ready for a human to manually review them according to criteria you establish when building up your golden record. The person checking the records may follow up with each discrepancy or might be able to decide how to proceed based on similar past experiences with customer data issues.

Need assistance in building your golden record database for a unified customer view?

The chances are good that you would prefer to devote your energy toward growing your business while leaving some of the heavy lifting of marketing activity to professionals. All of the first-party data that you obtain directly from customers can start working for you, to better market to each person in the database.

Today’s business owners will want to set up a data warehouse based on cloud computing services, where they can then store information on each customer to obtain a perfect, 360-degree view of each of them.

The Lytics platform is designed to help companies make better use of their data. For more information about golden record database construction and maintenance and how it contributes to building up a unified customer view, get in touch with us today.