The “Single Customer Record” Can Be a Problem for CDPs

You think that “the customer” means the same thing in all of your use cases when you organize your data around that word. That’s not always a good guess.

An important job of a customer data platform (CDP) is to collect data from various sources and put it all together in one record. That one customer record can hide bigger problems if you’re not careful, and it can make some of your use cases impossible. This guide will help you understand how to organize customer data in a way that helps your business and meets the specific needs of your customers.

Anyway, the idea of a single customer record isn’t really true.

When you have a single customer record, you will have more than one record (or identity) for the same person, no matter how hard you try to avoid it. It’s going to happen because:

• Use more than one browser on more than one device.
• Have more than one email address.
• Give them their login information.
• Get rid of their cookies.
• Deliberately try to get away from you as you try to track them.

You can solve some of these issues, but sometimes you need to take a step back and decide if it’s worth it.

If you build a website that makes money by showing ads based on what people like, does it matter if a single person has three profiles?

Does it matter if a husband and wife share an account on an e-commerce site?

Your business needs to be met by the idea of a “single customer record,” not the other way around. And what you mean by “customer” may change depending on the situation.

One customer with more than one email address

Allow me to give you a simple example. You only have one record for Joe Smith as a customer. It shows that Joe has three email addresses: one for work, one for home, and one for junk mail. He has three of your e-newsletters set up on his work email and two on his home email. In the morning, emails sent to his work email get clicked through. In the evening, emails sent to his home email get clicked through.

When will Joe’s “single customer record” say is the best time to email him? No matter what the outcome is, it won’t show how things really are.

In this case, you might not need to know the person’s best time of day, but you might need to know their email address. When is the best time for him to check his work email? When is the best time for him to check his home email? You don’t want a group of people who all open their emails in the morning. You need a list of all the email names that are checked first thing in the morning.

This always comes down to what you want to do. It’s not nearly as important to have a “single customer record” as it is to have your data to do what you need to do with it.

What does this mean for business to business?

When you organize your data around a person, like Joe did, there is a simple problem that can come up. People who work for someone else may be more important to you on a business-to-business (B2B) site than the employee themselves. Let me give you some examples.

• In account-based marketing (ABM), the goal is to find the right leads inside a business. It’s also helpful to know what the whole company needs and what hurts them, not just your contacts.
• Sales teams often split up their tasks by area. The place of the company where someone works is more important than their own location.
• Support and customer success teams need to keep track of all the contacts and touch points that happen within a company.
• For enterprise licenses, keeping track of how all workers use them might be necessary.

All of these situations make it hard to believe that “customer” always refers to a person. For companies, the government, schools, hospitals, retail chains, and other groups, you may need to look further than a single person to see the bigger picture.

“Bring your whole self…”

Once upon a time, people told us it would be fun to find out if our favorite sales teacher liked to ski, have a dog, or play the mandolin. People said that social media showed us the whole person. Personal information like this gave an online resume more depth and led to silly things like “bring your whole self to work.”

Then we found out that some people believe things we don’t like. For example, the fact that someone thought the Earth was flat made us forget about the fact that he was a great sales teacher.

There should be no reason for anyone to try to merge different characters into one record. People should be free to have different personas for things like work, church, and politics.

It’s not just a matter of making room for nuts and weirdos. There are many good reasons why people might want to keep separate names for different parts of their lives.

• The consultant works with five different types of people.
• The office boss who runs a charity on the weekends and has a separate bank account for work.
• This person makes logos for businesses and paints horse saddles for fun.
• The author who wants to keep guests who read fiction and those who read non-fiction separate.

Trying to fit everything into one record for each person doesn’t help you or your customer in this case.

Your use cases should guide how you set up your data.

Don’t worry about making a separate record for each person. Instead, think about what your business needs and how you can help your people the most. Talk to some of them to find out what they need and want. Life is strange, and so are people and things that happen to us. What your customers are going through might be very different from what you think.

Get your use cases down on paper and think about what you need to know to put them into action. When you gather that information, keep real people and companies in mind. Set up your data in a way that makes it easy to use your use cases, even if you don’t know for sure that you want a record for each customer.

In conclusion

There’s nothing inherently wrong with having a “single customer record” for each person, as long as you can sort, segment, activate, and report on other information about that person, like his email address, company affiliation, association membership, or something else.