According to Salesforce’s “State of Marketing” report, 46% of marketers say they lack important data on consumer preferences. This is a surprising shortfall given how much investment brands have made in building a unified view of the customer.
This unified view (it may be called something different in your organization, like a Customer 360 or a single source of truth, and they can be used interchangeably; here at Resonate, we call it the consumer data layer) is a customer-data infrastructure designed to synthesize, centralize, and activate.
Marketing teams have become quite sophisticated at building these systems, so why do nearly half of all organizations feel they’re missing something about their customers?
To answer that question, we’re going to take a deeper look at what makes a Customer 360 a worthwhile investment, identify some shortcomings in the traditional approach to building one, and look at opportunities to close those gaps and drive better marketing outcomes.
What Is a Customer 360?
The goal of a unified customer view or Customer 360 is a single, accurate, complete record of a person instead of scattered fragments of information across multiple systems. When you’ve built a successful Customer 360, you can trace behaviors back to specific customers to better engage, retain, or cross-sell. Here’s what makes it work.
The components of the unified view
A unified view of the customer typically shares these common features:
- Data ingestion — Data is pulled from every place a customer appears across their lifecycle, such as your CRM, website or app traffic, email, point-of-sale info, loyalty programs, and ad platforms.
- Identity resolution — Those identifiers across touchpoints are matched to individual customers to help drive marketing efforts, personalization, or LTV analytics.
- Profile creation — This is the output, sometimes called an identity graph, that allows every other system across marketing, support, or analytics can query in real time.
The kind of data that makes it into the final customer profile or identity graph is a combination of first-party data (such as transaction history or customer email); behavioral data (such as the actions customers take while on your website or app); and demographics (such as age, gender, or location).
How it’s built
There are several approaches to building the architecture of your unified view, including:
- Purchase an all-in-one platform. A vendor handles ingestion, identity resolution, and activation inside their system on a copy of your data they store and maintain.
- Build on top of the data warehouse you already run. Your own team keeps one copy of the data in your warehouse and builds identity resolution on top of it, rather than duplicating that data into a separate vendor-owned store.
- Combine the two. Your data stays in your warehouse, but a vendor builds and runs the identity resolution on top of it, so you get a managed capability without your team building and without a second copy of your data.
What Are the Limitations of a Typical Customer 360?
The customer knowledge shortfall that was identified in the Salesforce survey stems from four limitations inherent in the typical Customer 360:
- It only knows the people already in your systems. The unified view is built from owned data, so it’s great at segmenting people you already know. It just can’t help you at all with anyone else. Lookalike models, prospecting, and expansion into new segments extrapolate from your existing customer base, making it difficult to identify your next-best customer…unless they’re identical to your old ones and the people in that pool remain static forever.
- It knows what happened, but not why. A record of behavior can’t capture motivation. The values that make a customer choose your brand over a competitor or the changes in life stage that might motivate another purchase are the kinds of things that allow you to predict what a consumer will do next…and your unified view can’t see them.
- Deeper understanding doesn’t connect to action. Even when a brand does the work to understand the “why” of customer behavior, through research or a segmentation study, that insight usually lives outside the customer 360, in a deck or a report, not inside the identity graph itself. It gets read once and rarely makes it into the targeting logic that actually runs the business.
- The risks and costs compound over time. These limitations can be expensive. Acquisition costs rise as spend goes to people who look like customers on paper but were never going to convert. And existing customers’ lives and needs may change, but the outputs of your unified view don’t, so you keep treating them exactly the same. Accenture data shows that 61% of consumers leave a brand the moment it stops feeling relevant to them, which means the risks of stale engagement can cost you retention and loyaly.
How to Overcome the Limitations of Your Customer 360
You don’t have to overhaul your entire data infrastructure to address these limitations. The consumer data layer you’ve built is still the right foundation. What’s missing is a why to understand the consumer motivations your 360 is missing and use them to anticipate future actions and needs. This is called predictive consumer intelligence, and it can be added directly to your existing environment with Predictive Consumer Intelligence Install.
Resonate built Predictive Consumer Intelligence Install to close the holes in your unified view to deliver more actionable information about your customers. Rather than requiring a customer file to initiate matching, Install delivers Resonate’s full catalog of individual-level predictive attributes for use directly inside a brand’s own environment, their custome data platform (CDP), their Snowflake instance, or their data warehouse.
Install covers 12,000+ attributes across psychographics, personal values, in-market intent signals across 30-, 90-, and 365-day windows, media consumption, and consumer preferences spanning more than 250 million people across the full US adult population. And because the attribute set includes psychographics, values, and intent rather than transaction history alone, the same understanding that explains why an existing customer buys is now available for the much larger population who hasn’t bought yet.
The intelligence is built by Resonate directly, so there’s no co-licensing complexity and no requirement to route activity through Resonate’s systems. It belongs to the brand to use inside the infrastructure they already run, which means the insight isn’t a deck that gets read once and shelved. It lives inside the same system that drives targeting, personalization, and measurement, so research, media planning, and creative are finally working from one understanding instead of three.
And because the underlying data is built from tens of billions of ongoing observations rather than a point-in-time study, it keeps pace as people change, whether that’s a shift in life stage, priorities, or what they value. When a brand’s own first-party data comes in, it layers directly on top of this foundation. The result is coverage a first-party system alone can’t produce: complete knowledge of who’s already a customer, real understanding of everyone who isn’t yet, and a picture of both that keeps up as people change.
Resonate Can Illuminate the Blindspots in Your Unified View
If you’re ready to graduate from “almost unified” to a complete Customer 360, schedule some time with our data experts today and find out what Predictive Consumer Intelligence Install can do for your brand.
