A Golden Record and why it is crucial in today’s retail environment
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A Golden Record and why it is crucial in today’s retail environment

3 min read • Dec 15, 2022

Marija Stanković
Business Development Manager

Continuing our end-to-end consumer shopping journey, where so far, we have covered the importance of smooth connections between back and front end, we have another equally important topic to dig into – the need for joining multiple data silos into a single customer profile, with the focus on a single point of truth and a Golden Record.

As we are all aware, customers nowadays shop on multiple platforms, hence creating digital and physical trails that are sometimes not easily recognisable or merged into one profile. To simplify this, we will look at an example. Let’s take a typical retail customer, and let’s name her Ana Smith. When Ana visits your online store for the first time, she places an order but does not create a profile. The purchase under the name ‘A Smith’ is recorded in the web store, and then this info is sent to the CRM, where the customer record is created. A few weeks later, she visits your physical store to make another purchase and at the prompting of a sales associate, signs up for your customer loyalty programme. To complete the application, she gives her first and last name, and a new customer record is created for ‘Ana Smith’.

What happens is that now there are two records in the system for one customer; one is under ‘A Smith’, and the second is ‘Ana Smith’. Depending on where and how she shops in the future, two separate profiles and two separate data trails are created, and thus she is going to be targeted separately. Not optimal, right?

Now, we have taken only one customer as an example, but most retailers have thousands of records created on daily basis, making this problem exponentially worse. This is where a deduplication tool really makes a difference. The deduplication tool recognises through matching processes that these two (or more) profiles indeed belong to one person and merges them automatically into one. This is an essential prerequisite to building a Golden Record, or more commonly known as a Single Point of Truth.

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Why is the Golden Record important?

In order to leverage your data, and run efficient marketing campaigns, having a Golden Record is crucial. Everybody talks about the importance of data but gathering it all without being able to sift through it quickly, and make decisions based on what is learnt, makes all the data you gather useless.

After deduplication, an efficient Golden Record management platform takes data from multiple sources (ERP data, loyalty programmes, web store behaviour, to name a few) and stores them in a single place for a true 360° view of the customer. We call this a Customer Data Platform. This is a read-only place with a snapshot of the customer, which then connects to all other marketing tactics in order to execute campaigns.

When you layer an AI-backed personalisation tool on top of all of this, we can then start talking about achieving the true, best utilisation of your data. Stay tuned for our next blogpost to read about creating a personalised experience through the aforementioned single point of truth and utilisation of artificial intelligence.

If you can’t wait until then, and want to learn more about the Golden Record, hit the ‘Contact Us’ button below, and let’s talk!

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About the Author

Marija Stanković

Business Development Manager

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