Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Single Customer View delivers all your marketing data direct to your desktop in an easy-to-use CRM interface for editing records and recording contact history.

Traditional marketing databases contain people and locations, or contacts at organisations. This is fine for some applications but doesn’t easily allow the linkage of multiple locations/organisations to one parent organisation, nor does it allow for a person to belong to multiple organisations or to multiple locations... something that is very common with central government and large corporate databases.

The core CRM data structure allows a single contact to belong to both multiple locations and multiple organisations, preventing un-necessary duplication and poor record management. Crucially this structure allows your users to see a single very detailed record for what is often the most important contacts in a marketing database.

So, in one place, Single Customer View can present a complete picture of demographics, transactions and marketing history, for each and every contact within the application.

Take a look at some of our enhanced CRM features from the menu on the left or contact us for more information.

Record management

Flexible record creation is an essential feature of any CRM to ensure maximum usage and acceptance of a centrally controlled database.

Single Customer View gives users the ability (given that they have the specific permissions), to classify their own records in a highly structured way. The add record, search and edit facilities can be divided so that separate user permissions can be maintained for each function. Users can search using any combination of the name and address fields and they can also search for records by business unit and by interest classification.

The Manage Contacts area allows users to create a record from scratch or to use an existing organisation or site to pre-populate part of the new record. At the point of creation or editing, users can also add any combination of tags or interest classifications to either the contact or the site/organisation. A full set of opt-out permissions is maintained against each contact and can be edited here.

Importantly, users themselves can perform a very simple update query within the CRM interface, to give a group of records additional interests or tags, allowing them to add additional record classifications and group contacts together at any time.

Another important benefit of this approach is that it prevents users from submitting the same data to the database again because they want to make a simple new record classification, thus preventing un-necessary de-duplication activity and the costs associated with it.

Relationship history

Complete relationship histories at your fingertips for the first time.

The contact history function in our application provides users with a simple way of maintaining an account history for all the contact records in the database at the click of a button.

The application is specifically engineered to store a wide range of events against the individual contact, these include;

• Transactions
• Quotations
• Email transmissions
• Email click-throughs and reads
• Faxes
• SMS
• Direct mail
• Telephone conversations
• Meetings

Each of these events that is either collected via the Single Customer View or loaded into it subsequently (in the case of transactions or quotations), is attached to the individual contact record and can be viewed at the contact level. Individual emails and faxes sent to a contact or prospect can also be viewed in the contact history record.

Users can employ the calendar function in contact history to plan an individual activity, such as a meeting or telephone call, with a contact at a future date and time and receive an email reminder of that planned event.

List management

Single Customer View makes building highly effective marketing lists extremely easy. With its unique selection tools anyone in your organisation can export lists for use in mailings or e-marketing campaigns.

Users are provided with a simple interface to make complex data selections based on any attribute of a record without the need to understand SQL. Users can create and then re-use or exclude previous data selections and there are no limits on the size or complexity of data selection criteria.

Data selection requires users to either select from a tree view or a drop-down menu of the criteria they want. They can amend their criteria until they are satisfied with the resulting count, they then save the selection criteria in order to use or export (if they have the permission to do so) the chosen data.

We use a building block system, wherein users of large complex datasets make building blocks of their requirements which they then include or exclude in a final data selection query.

The data export function allows users to create a physical data output by running a previously saved selection. As the selection is run for output, the records returned are checked for their suppression status and any records where suppression is set to true are removed from the output, thereby complying with Data Protection legislation.

Users can also exclude any previous datasets from their planned export to prevent campaign overlap.

Fast & efficient data loading

SCV allows users to load owned and 3rd party data (permissions allowing) through a self contained data loading function.

No specialist knowledge is required, only that they can produce a text file of their data and then map the fields to the database in a simple graphical interface once the data has been submitted.

This feature more than any other, has led to the growth in the use of the SCV, since users are now in charge of loading and classifying their own data.

In order to ensure that any data loaded does not create a serious duplication problem in the database, a rudimentary merge takes place when the data is loaded based on the name, email and organisation fields. A full merge of data is performed monthly on each dataset.

The data loader also has the facility to allow users to specify what happens to the data when it is loaded – they can also add 3rd party data so that prospect data can be stored as well as customer data. When loading 3rd party data the ‘usage’ type is specified so business rules can be created around the data (i.e. one-time-only, multiple use and also the expiry date).

Consolidate multiple data feeds

Import data from numerous sources using our automated processes - consolidate every customer record within your organisation without compromising data integrity.

The Single Customer View database can handle any marketing data you have; customers, prospects, transactions, demographics, marketing history, e-marketing data, suppressions, web data, just about anything. The difference is that the SCV can link all this information to a person, giving you a complete picture of what someone’s relationship with your organisation is.

Imagine being able to see your multi channel relationship with a customer, and all the marketing communications from you and their responses in the same place. We can aggregate all your customer and transaction data into a single database. To find out more, contact us.

Email Broadcast

Single Customer View’s email broadcast service works in conjunction with our analytics and list building programs to bring you professional quality broadcast emails with minimal effort.

Rather than have a high number of people receive your emails and ignore them or even worse unsubscribe, Single Customer View can refine your audience to only the most relevant recipients and therefore the most likely to respond.

Single Customer View’s analytics module will help you decide who you want to be mailing by giving your email reports on who has been interested in similar projects or products, who opens their mails from you and who goes on to click any links contained within those emails.

Single Customer View can also tell the difference between hard and soft email bounces, i.e. emails that are returned due to out of office or full mailbox differ from emails returned due to errors in domain name, for example ‘name@hardbounce.com’. This significantly reduces the chance of possible sales slipping through the net due to small manageable errors.

By using the tagging function or list building system enables you to filter your target audience for your mails. You can greatly enhance the levels of success you expect from your broadcast mailing by utilising the analytics modules and ensuring you are reaching the people who count.

Once you have your audience, the email building is easy. Single Customer View lets you create professional standard emails with a few clicks and when you upload your tagged or listed customers as mailing lists, the right people are informed about the latest information within seconds.

Web forms & surveys

Customers can update their contact information and preferences via online forms for real-time updates of their profiles. Increasing the accuracy of your data, whilst decreasing the time you spend collecting it.

Create forms within the Single Customer View application using existing database fields and either publish the form to our web server, or grab the code to restyle on your own website.

The data captured in the form is de-duped, tagged for easy retrieval, and fed into the SCV database ready for selection.

Help & support

Because Single Customer View is an internet based service, should you need any advice or support when using it, you can get answers at the speed you need them from our dedicated support team.

All users have access to the support function where they can request help with a specific task, report an error or a problem or search the support database and FAQ. Users can attach documents, screen grabs and data files to their support tickets.

Importantly as part of the service contract that underpins the provision of the SCV, we are contractually bound to respond to all support tickets within 8 hours. All our customers use this self-contained support mechanism and all fix rate within 24 hours is higher than 90%.