For CDPs, the ‘single customer record’ can be a distraction

When you organize your data around “the customer,” you assume “the customer” has the same meaning for all your use cases. That’s not always a good assumption. 

The general purpose of a customer data platform (CDP) is to gather information from different sources and consolidate that data into a single record. If you’re not careful, that single customer record can obscure larger issues, and it can trip up some of your use cases. This article will give you a larger perspective on how to organize customer information to further your company’s interests and to accommodate your customers’ unique needs. 

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The single customer record is a bit of a myth anyway

The first thing to know about the single customer record is that despite your best efforts, you will have multiple records (or profiles) for the same person. It’s inevitable because people:

• Use multiple browsers on multiple devices.
• Have multiple email addresses.
• Share their login credentials.
• Delete their cookies.
• Intentionally try to defeat your efforts to track them.

While there are ways to deal with some of these problems, sometimes you have to step back and ask if it’s worth it. 

If you run a site that’s monetized by displaying ads based on content preferences, does it matter if an individual user has three profiles in your system? 

If you run an ecommerce site, does it matter if a husband and wife share a login? 

The “single customer record” concept has to serve your business needs, not the other way around, and your definition of “customer” might change across different use cases.

One customer with multiple email addresses

Let’s take a simple illustration. You have a single customer record for Joe Smith. Joe has three email addresses in his profile: his work email, his home email and his junk email. He subscribes to three of your e-newsletters on his work email and to two on his home email. He clicks through from emails sent to his work email in the morning, but he clicks through on his home email in the evening. 

What will Joe’s “single customer record” show as the best time of day to email him? Whatever result you get, it won’t reflect the reality of the situation. 

In this case, you might not want to know the best time of day for the person, but for the email address. There’s a best time of day for his work email and there’s a different best time of day for his home email. You don’t want a segment that includes all the people who open emails in the morning. You want a segment of all the email addresses that get opened in the morning. 

As always, this comes down to your use cases. The “single customer record” is not nearly as important as having your data in a format that allows you to do what you need to do with it. 

What does this mean for B2B? 

Joe’s case is a relatively simple wrinkle that can happen when you structure your data around a person. If you’re running a B2B site, you may want to focus on the individual’s business more than the individual employee. Here are some examples. 

• In account-based marketing (ABM), efforts are directed toward finding the right leads within a company. It’s also helpful to know the needs and pain points of the entire organization rather than individual contacts. 
• Sales teams often divide their responsibilities by territory. An individual person’s location is not as important as the location of the company he works for. 
• Customer success and support teams need to track all the interactions and touch points within an organization. 
• Enterprise licenses might depend on tracking the usage of all employees. 

These cases all challenge the idea that “customer” always points to a person. With businesses, government entities, schools, hospitals, retail chains, etc., sometimes you have to zoom out beyond the individual to get the full picture. 

Dig deeper: Real-time customer data platforms: The promise and the reality

‘Bring your whole person…’ 

In the early days of social media we were told it was interesting to know if our favorite sales trainer liked to ski, had a dog or played the mandolin. Social media claimed to expose us to the whole person. This personal information gave depth to an online profile and led to such absurdities as “bring your whole self to work.” 

Then we learned that some people believe things we don’t like, and the fact that someone was a very good sales trainer was overshadowed by the fact that he thought the Earth was flat — which we didn’t really need to know. 

People need the liberty to have multiple personas — a work persona, a church persona, a political persona — and it’s not in anybody’s interests to try to merge them into a single record. 

This isn’t just a matter of accommodating nuts and weirdos. There are several perfectly legit scenarios where people want to maintain different profiles for different aspects of their life. 

• The consultant with five clients in different industries. 
• The office manager who has one account for work and another account for the charity he runs on the weekend. 
• The graphic designer who works on company logos and also paints horse saddles. 
• The writer who wants to keep his fiction and non-fiction audiences separate. 

In such cases, trying to force everything into a single record for each person doesn’t help you or your customer. 

Your data structure should follow your use cases 

Set aside the idea of creating one record for each person. Instead, focus on your business needs and how you can best serve your customers. Be sure to talk to some of them to find out what they really want and need. Life is weird, and both people and situations can be quirky. The real-life situations of your customers might be completely different than what you think.  

Write up your use cases and figure out what you need to know to act on them. Collect that information with actual people and businesses in mind. Structure your data to make it easy to act on your use cases without first presupposing that you want one record for each customer. 

Dig deeper: Open-source customer data platforms: Can you unleash your data for less?

Conclusion

It’s not that there’s anything inherently wrong with a “single customer record” for each person — provided you’re able to sort, segment, activate and report on other attributes connected with that person, whether that’s his email address, company affiliation, association membership or some other property. 

Your goal with a CDP is not to create a single customer record for each individual. Your goal is to use your data in a way that furthers your business requirements. Make sure the “single customer record” is helping and not hurting those efforts.