How to drive customer engagement through data unification in SA

The South African market is evolving, and consumers are increasingly frustrated by irrelevant and generic messages — it’s essential for brands to address this disconnect.

A recent report on personalisation highlights a crucial takeaway: 18.9% of South African customers feel frustrated when they receive irrelevant messages from brands.

This sentiment is echoed globally, but it underscores a significant challenge for brands in South Africa: how to create a personalized experience that resonates with customers across multiple touchpoints.

The challenge of multiple channels

With the digital landscape constantly evolving, and with more than 70% of consumers shopping online in South Africa, consumers are demanding a satisfying shopping experience and convenience.

So, more and more retailers have turned to omnichannel retailing to accommodate the needs of their customers. Yet, this is where brands often encounter a common pitfall: fragmented customer data. Multiple datasets capturing the same customer interactions can lead to confusion and inconsistency in messaging.

Imagine receiving an email offer that doesn't match what you just saw on a brand's Instagram. It's frustrating, right? This disjointed experience is not only confusing for customers, but it can also erode their trust in the brand. To successfully navigate these challenges and make every customer interaction count, brands must establish a unified customer view.

What is a unified customer view?A Unified Customer View (or UCV) is a holistic approach that consolidates data from all customer interactions into a unified profile.

This creates a comprehensive understanding of each customer’s behavior, preferences, and purchase history. In practical terms, UCV means marketers don't have to toggle between different applications to get insights; instead, they can access all the information they need from a single source. Doing so empowers brands to:

1. Enhance personalisation: By understanding individual preferences, brands can craft targeted messages, offers, and recommendations that resonate deeply with customers.
   
2. Improve customer experience: A consistent experience across channels — be it email, social media, mobile apps, or in-store — fosters customer loyalty.
   
3. Increase marketing efficiency: When marketers eliminate redundant efforts and work from a unified data set, their campaigns become considerably more effective.
   
4. Facilitate omnichannel engagement: Seamless transitions across channels ensure that customers enjoy a fluid experience with the brand, regardless of how they choose to interact.
   

The pervasive problem of data silos

However, despite the pressing need for a unified approach, many omnichannel brands continue to grapple with data silos.

This fragmentation leads to a host of challenges that don’t allow brands to be truly omnichannel and can seriously impede their success:

Incomplete customer insights: Different departments often lack access to up-to-date information about the customer, resulting in a piecemeal understanding of their preferences.

Poor data quality: Data fragmentation brings with it the risk of inaccuracies — incomplete, duplicated, or out-of-date information complicates decision-making.

Operational inefficiency: When teams work from separate datasets, they often duplicate efforts. This lack of coordination makes it not only challenging to deliver a cohesive customer experience but also hampers overall brand agility.

The solution: data unification

To overcome these hurdles, data unification emerges as a fundamental solution. Integrating data is about unifying customer touchpoints across offline and online channels through processes and tools, allowing brands to extract, cleanse, and make use of data for maximum impact.

In the South African e-commerce landscape, brands that successfully implement unified customer profiles have observed up to a 20% increase in average order value. This demonstrates a direct, tangible financial benefit to unifying customer data.

The process typically includes:

Extracting data from disparate source systems to gather a complete picture

Transforming data through standardization and cleansing to eliminate inconsistencies

Loading the data into centralized repositories, such as data warehouses or lakes

Mapping and cleansing data to ensure accuracy and discussing any potential discrepancies

Synchronizing data to keep all stakeholders informed of real-time updates

Implementing quality checks to oversee the data integrity of integrated sources.

By effectively integrating data, brands can create a cohesive image of customer behavior, preferences, and interactions.

The benefits of a unified customer view

A Unified Customer View harnesses holistic data from various sources — including CRM systems, social media platforms, transaction records, and more — creating a single source of truth for business decision-making.

The advantages are numerous:

1. Enhanced understanding of customer behavior: Brands gain an in-depth perspective on customer desires and tendencies.
   
2. Informed decision-making: With a complete customer profile at their fingertips, brands can make data-driven decisions that lead to strategic success.
   
3. Fostering loyalty and trust: When customers see that brands understand and cater to their needs, it builds trust and encourages loyalty.
   

Customer Data and Engagement Platforms (or CDEPs) are pioneering efforts to empower brands across Africa with the tools and strategies needed to implement effective data integration and achieve a Unified Customer View.

Such platforms are a surefire winner when it comes to navigating the complex landscape of customer interactions, transforming overwhelming data into actionable insights that can fuel growth.

Wrapping up

As we look ahead, it is clear that the future belongs to brands that prioritize customer-centricity through data integration. A Unified Customer View can unlock significant opportunities for businesses, helping to create personalised experiences that not only engage customers but also promote long-term loyalty.

In a market as vibrant and dynamic as Africa, where customer expectations are high, now is the perfect time to invest in platforms (like CDEPs) that set brands apart. The future of customer engagement is bright, and it starts with a unified view of your customers.