Single Customer View (SCV): What Is It & How It Works (2025)

Sarah has made two purchases from your online website. She’s accumulated 300 loyalty points and it’s her birthday next week. Last time she visited your store, she explored the idea of spending loyalty points on her favorite skincare bundle. 

Retail staff can use this data to skip the usual spiel and divert Sarah straight to the skincare bundle the next time she visits. They can even send a personalized marketing email that reminds Sarah of her loyalty points—and perhaps add another 100 bonus points as a birthday gift. 

A single customer view (SCV) makes this possible. Think of it as a “golden record”—a real-time, 360-degree view of a customer that offers one consistent, reliable source of truth. 

But while the idea of this so-called golden record can offer omnichannel retailers opportunities to understand their customers and personalize the buying experience, the process of actually creating them can become a big obstacle. The cost and complexity that typically come with operating multiple data systems can quickly overwhelm omnichannel retailers. 

What is a single customer view (SCV)?

A single customer view (SCV) is a comprehensive profile that stores every piece of data you’ve collected on a customer. This unified customer profile details everything from stores they’ve visited, items they’ve bought, loyalty points they’ve accumulated, products they’ve returned, and surveys they’ve completed. 

The single customer view relies on these three components to work together:

• Unification: combining data from multiple channels and touchpoints.
• Consistency: ensuring all departments use the same customer data.
• Accuracy: maintaining high-quality, up-to-date information.

Benefits of SCV

A single customer view gives retailers a 360-view of each individual shopper, which offers the following benefits: 

• Personalized customer experiences. SCV offers a holistic view of the customer. Spot how they prefer to buy, the marketing campaigns they engage with, and the product categories they’re interested in. This is paramount in today’s retail environment: half of consumers say personalized offers and promotions from brands they’ve interacted with improve their shopping experience.
• Improved customer retention. When you know what influences shoppers to buy, you can reverse engineer campaigns that encourage retention. For example, if you spot that a customer has responded positively to your feedback survey and has made two purchases, invite them to join your loyalty program.
• Simplifies compliance. If a customer requests access to their data or wants it to be deleted, an SCV enables you to respond quickly since all data is in one place. Plus, because data isn’t stored in different tools, you’ll reduce the risk of inconsistent or outdated information being used without proper consent.
• Improve omnichannel operational efficiency. Unified customer profiles pull data from your online store and POS system into one system—no patchy middleware required. Shopify retailers using this feature reduce operational complexity and benefit from a 22% lower total cost of ownership as a result. 

How to create a single customer view

1. Identify data sources

Customers interact with brands across multiple channels. Without data from all sources, you only see fragments of the customer journey—not the big picture. 

Start by identifying which technologies you’re using and the data you can collect from each. We can group these into three primary data sources:

• Online channels, such as websites, ecommerce stores, marketplace listings, and social media storefronts.
• Offline channels, such as point of sale (POS) systems, in-store experiences, and call centers.
• Third-party data integrations, such as CRM platforms, partner databases, and loyalty apps. 

2. Collect customer data into a CDP

Once you know where your data is coming from, standardize your process for collecting it. A customer data platform (CDP) helps do this at scale. It securely collects and stores data in a central repository that’s accessible to those who need it. 

The best CDPs:

• Integrate with internal and external data sources outlined above.
• Offer real-time data processing.
• Have robust data security measures to maintain compliance. 
• Standardize fields such as names, emails, dates, and phone numbers.
• Support custom attributes and metafields (e.g., loyalty points earned) 

3. Match and unify customer records 

A single customer might appear in your CDP under slightly different names or emails.

Failing to match duplicate data can give you a false perception of each individual customer. Perhaps their transaction history for in-store and POS purchases lives in two separate profiles. Retail staff don’t see this on their POS device and, therefore, treat in-person shoppers as new customers. In reality, they’ve made multiple purchases, just under a different online account. 

There are two ways to unify customer data inside your CDP:

• Deterministic matching, which uses unique identifiers such as email addresses, phone numbers, and payment details to match customer records.
• Probabilistic matching, which uses signals such as a user’s behavior, location, and IP address to identify customers and unify data. This turns anonymous behavior (e.g., a website visit) into a known profile (e.g., John Smith).

💡Tip: Shopify automatically builds a unified customer profile whenever someone shares their email address or phone number with your business. Any supplementary data feeds back to this unified view in real time, no matter which sales channel you initially sourced it from.

4. Analyze data to improve customer experiences

It’s not enough to simply collect data and build a unified customer profile—the real value of the SCV lies within what you do with it. 

Treat your SCV as an opportunity to answer questions about your customer journey. Who are our top customers? Who’s at risk of churn? What outreach would convince this person to buy again? Tweak retail strategies based on what you find. For example:

• If Ankit always makes a purchase off the back of a discount code, invite him to your loyalty program where he can earn rewards to redeem on future purchases.
• If Sarah always buys coffee but never flavored beans, offer a bundle that combines bestsellers in either category as a way to get her to try new products.
• If Laila only shops around the school holidays, reach out during the summer to highlight back-to-school deals. 

Most importantly, remember that an SCV is never “done”—customers change their email addresses, update their preferences, and have new regulations to protect their information. Treat yours as a living system that grows with your customers. 

Challenges with creating a single customer view

Retailers struggle with creating a unified customer view because of these issues: 

• Aggregated data. Some external data sources aggregate data, which makes it tricky to attribute behavior to a specific customer profile. Combat this by prioritizing first-party data sourced directly from the customer through surveys, quizzes, and transactional data inside your retail POS. 
• Data privacy concerns. A single customer view includes shoppers’ personal details, including their payment details and shipping address. Retailers have a legal obligation to protect this data. Do so by ensuring that your customer data repository has advanced security features such as two-factor authentication, role-based access, encryption, tokenization, and immutable audit trails. 
• Siloed data. It’s not uncommon for customer support tickets to sit inside a CRM, loyalty points to live in a third-party app, and sales data to be housed inside your POS. Issues arise, however, when this data isn’t interconnected or updated in real time. Shopify solves this problem by acting as a commerce operating system that includes core functions in a single business “brain”. 

SCV case studies

Parachute

Home furnishings brand Parachute operates a thriving network of retail stores alongside an ecommerce website. It’s important that customers get the same personalized experience wherever they shop. “That personal connection is really what we are and what we want our teams to focus on; we see a big impact from that,” says retail operations manager Juliette Grant. 

Parachute uses the HubSpot CRM to store customer data. It turned to Shopify POS to unify data it’d collect through both POS and ecommerce and tailor the retail experience—even if the customer doesn’t interact with the same sales associate each time. 

Unified customer profiles inside Shopify also let Parachute’s marketing team follow up with customers after making an in-store purchase, while mentioning topics of conversation during their visit. 

"The data we have access to by having everything in a unified place through Shopify has allowed us to truly understand our customers and tailor our communications to meet their needs," says founder Ariel Kaye. "This level of personalization is what sets us apart in a crowded market."

Tomlinson’s

Texas-based pet supplies brand Tomlinson’s previously operated a disjointed combination of separate POS and ecommerce systems. This presented challenges—notably the inability to track customer interactions across different sales channels.

“We have to be able to track customer profiles and ensure the appropriate profile tags and discounts are associated with each profile for 365 days,” says owner and operator Kate Knecht. “And the Pet Club discount needs to be automatically applied to each transaction. There can’t be any manual extra steps. It needs to be seamless for the customer and for the team.”

Tomlinson’s turned to Shopify POS to unify inventory, order, and customer data from online and offline sales channels. As a result, it got one single customer view that compiled every interaction into a unified profile—all while improving retail productivity and reducing in-store checkout queues by 56%. 

Diane Von Furstenberg

Diane von Furstenberg is a booming fashion brand that serves customers in over 70 countries through its online store. In New York’s Meatpacking District you’ll also find its flagship store—a place for shoppers to interact with personal stylists and get a retail experience that’s highly personalized to them. 

DvF previously relied on Salesforce to manage its retail operations, but quickly learned that it was difficult to unify data into a single customer view. So, it turned to Shopify. 

“I love that, with Shopify POS, I can dig into the items my customers have ordered online and bought at our store,” says assistant store manager Joanna Puccio. “That’s something we weren’t able to do as easily before. We had to build custom reports using data from two systems, but now I can click on the customer’s profile and see it all there. 

“I can see what a client bought, returned, their typical sizing, color preferences, even notes our staff add to their profiles—Shopify makes it easy to view customer information.”

Unify your retail operations with Shopify

Retailers have access to more data than ever before. On the surface, that might sound like you’ve got the best foundation to create a single customer view—but data overwhelm can become a reality, especially if snippets of information sit in disconnected systems. 

Shopify's unified data model as a foundation for omnichannel personalization. It brings together browsing, purchasing, and order data from all selling channels to create a single, holistic view of the customer. This becomes the foundation to deliver personalized shopping experiences wherever they shop.