How to build a single customer view

Imagine you’re on a sales call with a long-term client. You approach them with an upsell, not realising they raised a support ticket about a product issue yesterday. This awkward sales interaction would feel impersonal and fall flat, all because you don’t have the right information in front of you.

These days, customers expect you to know them. We’ve found that 71% of customers want personalised interactions, yet only 17% of store associates have access to a complete view of customer data. Without that visibility, every conversation risks being steered in the wrong direction.

A single customer view (SCV) fixes this by bringing all your data together into one profile. With all the right data in one place, your teams have the context they need to deliver a service that feels relevant and connected.

In this article, we’ll cover what a single customer view is, why it matters, how to build one, and the best practices to make it work.

A single view of a customer is one profile that combines all the customer's information from different sources into one place. This gives teams the context they need to deliver personalised experiences across sales, marketing, and service.

For example, it could pull billing information from your accounting platform, engagement stats from your social media, and past support tickets to create a full view of one customer.

Here are some of the common data types included in a single view of a customer and how they can help your business.

If you’re ready to dive straight into consolidating your customer data, here’s a quick overview of the five core steps to get started.

A single customer view helps both your business and your customers. For the business, it means better decisions, clearer measurements of ROI, and a true picture of customer lifetime value. It also makes it easier to find cross-sell and upsell opportunities – research shows that companies that excel at personalisation generate 40% more revenue .

For customers, the service feels faster, offers are more relevant, and interactions with the brand are consistent across every channel (social media, email, in-store).

Despite this, most companies still struggle to create a unified view of their customers. For example, in media and entertainment, 69% of leaders say a single view is critical, but only 11% say they have one.

On top of this, we found that 76% of customers expect consistency, while 54% feel like sales, service, and marketing don’t share information.

Perhaps this is because most businesses run into three common roadblocks when trying to create a complete view of their customers:

• Data silos: Customer information is scattered across systems
• Integration: Their tools weren’t built to work together
• Privacy: Consent and compliance need to be managed carefully

The good news is that the right technology can address each of these challenges.

We found that, in Australia, 97% of marketers say a centralised customer view is important, yet 81% are still measuring performance in silos.

It’s nearly impossible to build a single customer view without the right technology. However, with the right tools, centralising data becomes a natural part of your workflow that requires no extra effort.

To achieve this, you don’t always need every tool on the market. The right setup depends on your size, industry, and goals. A strong CRM already combines customer records, connects teams, and offers reporting in one place.

Other tools become useful when you need more scale or advanced capabilities. For example:

• Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): Add extra data from more channels to build richer profiles
• Integration tools: Link specialised systems so information flows across the business
• Analytics and visualisation tools: Provide deeper reporting and advanced insights

If you’re ready to get started consolidating and acting on customer data, try Salesforce CRM free for 30 days .

Here’s a five-step plan to move from scattered data to a single customer view you can use to delight customers and drive more sales.

Start by getting clear on why you want a single customer view. Are you aiming to improve retention, increase repeat purchases, or give your support team better access to each customer's history? Choosing a specific outcome keeps the project focused and avoids collecting data that’s not useful.

Tip: Talk to people across sales, service, and marketing before you lock in your goals. They’ll often flag pain points you might not have noticed.

Look at the systems you already use, such as your CRM, ecommerce platform, loyalty program, service desk, or social media. Bringing these together breaks down silos and gives you a fuller picture of each customer.

Tip: Open a spreadsheet and list every system that stores customer information. Next to each one, write what type of data it holds. This gives you a clear map of where customer data lives before you start connecting anything.

Check for errors, remove duplicates, and give each customer a single ID across touchpoints. This creates reliable records that teams can trust and stops confusion from incomplete or conflicting data.

Tip: Start small by picking one data type, like customer names. Look for duplicates or missing details and fix them. Once you’ve cleaned that set, move on to the next.

Once you’ve pulled the basics together, you can start adding extra details to make customer profiles more useful. These could include things like browsing history, how often someone opens your emails, or how long they’ve been a customer.

Gathering this information helps you group customers into segments; for example, first-time buyers or loyal, repeat customers.

Tip: Start with one simple add-on, like tracking which products people look at most before buying. Even a small insight like this can help you be more targeted with your customer communication.

The final step is to take the information you’ve collected and turn it into something you can action. Start by looking at reports in your CRM to spot patterns. For example, take note of the products customers often buy together, or which support issues come up most often. These insights highlight places you can personalise your marketing, update your knowledge base service, or reward loyalty.

Tip: Begin with one clear insight, like ‘customers who buy product A usually come back for another product B.’ You can then use this insight to create a simple follow-up campaign.

L’Oréal is the world’s leading beauty company, with more than 35 brands and billions of products sold each year. Due to this scale, their data became siloed, which made it difficult to deliver personalised experiences.

To solve this, L’Oréal turned to Salesforce to create real-time views of each customer. Service Cloud brought all their support data into one place, so employees no longer had to switch between systems. Marketing Cloud also gave them the ability to use both real-time and historical data to deliver personalised recommendations and offers at scale.

As a result, support team satisfaction has increased by 70% because they no longer have to juggle multiple systems. Customers also receive faster support and more relevant interactions across every channel.

Many vendors now offer tools to help create a single customer view, often through CRM or CDPs. The right software choice depends on your size, goals, and how complex your data needs are.

A single customer view is only as strong as how you use it. These practices can help you turn data that sits in your software into data that drives long-term advantage:

• Start small and scale: Focus on one use case first, then expand once you see results.
• Prioritise data quality: Accurate data is more valuable than collecting everything you can.
• Protect privacy: Make sure you comply with GDPR , the AU Privacy Act , and other relevant regulations.
• Align your teams: Sales, service, marketing, and IT all need to work with the same customer view.
• Use automation and AI: Automate routine tasks like deduplication and use AI to surface insights faster.
• Avoid over-collecting data: Only gather what you actually need to improve the customer experience.
• Track success with clear KPIs: Measure results through metrics like churn reduction, repeat purchase rates, or NPS.

Following these practices helps you build a single customer view that both delivers value for your business and creates better experiences for your customers.