Single Customer View
How Single Customer View Improves Customer Database Quality
Having a single view of your customers, meaning that your core customer database does not have duplicate records has many clear benefits:
- Avoid wasted outreach (duplicated mailings, emails and retargeting) which can be costly and actually hurt branding
- See the full customer picture
- Accurately assess life time value
- Improve Customer Predictive Analytics
While there are ways to consolidate records using fuzzy logic matching on name and address fields, this approach is not recommended since it can introduce errors and is not reliable enough to create the single “golden record” of truth in your customer database.
A better approach to achieve an accurate single customer view is to use third-party technology such as the AbiliTec Consumer Link, which uses a massive historical knowledge base of past addresses, names, phones and emails, including mis-spellings and nicknames going back decades as a reference against which to match your customer records.
What is an AbiliTec Consumer Link?
An AbiliTec Consumer Link (from Acxiom) is a persistent alpha-numeric string that can be appended to each customer record to achieve the highest possible match accuracy. The technology and knowledge-base for this solution was developed by Acxiom. If the strings from two records match, then they are extremely likely to be the same person. If not, then they are very unlikely to be the same person. Of course, learning is ongoing and in some cases two records will be merged and a single record will actually be determined to be two people and will be split.
The Consumer link is appended to your customer record and becomes a key part of your CRM/customer database.
Because understanding total activity or spending at the household level is also very important for customer insight, life-time value and analytics, Acxiom also developed the Abilitec Household Link. The Household Link groups consumer links that are in the same household.
How to Append AbiliTec Links to Customer Records
AbiliTec Consumer (and Household) Links can be appended using either Batch FTP or the Data Pipe / API (aka data pipe or connector). Batch is suitable for appends that happen daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly. The Data Services API is designed to process new records as they are added to the customer file in real time but can also handle larger files in batches of up to 1,000 records at a time.