We are building a Digital Twin for every site.

The simplest way to explain what that means is to compare it with a concept most enterprises are already familiar with: Customer One View. If Customer One View brings together different interactions to create a more complete understanding of an individual, a Site Digital Twin does something similar for a physical location. In our case, that location could be a house. The Digital Twin creates a connected view of the site, bringing together the people associated with it, the products connected to it and the interactions that have happened around it.

This changes the way we look at an address. In most enterprise systems, an address is simply an attribute attached to a customer profile. It tells us where someone lives, where a product was delivered or where a service needs to be provided. But for businesses operating in categories closely connected to homes, the site often carries much more context than that. It is where products are used, where services are delivered and where multiple people can participate in the same journey. Treating it as just another field in a customer record means losing much of that relationship.

The model we are building therefore treats the site as an entity in its own right. A customer can be associated with one or more sites, while a single site can have several people associated with it. Products and services can be linked to the relevant site, and interactions can be understood not only through the person initiating them but also through the location they concern. The intention is not to create another database or flatten everyone into one profile. Individual customers remain distinct. The Digital Twin simply establishes the relationships that already exist in the real world but are often invisible across enterprise systems.

When three people at one house look like three unrelated journeys

The value of this becomes clearer when we look at a fairly common customer scenario. Imagine three people associated with the same house reaching out to a brand. One contacts customer support with a query, another raises a service-related concern and a third person contacts the brand about something similar. If each person exists as an independent customer record, the organisation may see three separate interactions. Every person is correctly identified, every conversation may be recorded and the underlying data may be perfectly accurate. Yet the organisation can still miss the fact that all three conversations are connected to the same site.

That is an important distinction. The problem is not always poor customer data or an inability to identify individuals. Sometimes, the information required to understand the relationship exists, but the data has not been organised around the context that connects it. A Site Digital Twin provides that context. When someone associated with a particular house interacts with the brand, the organisation can also understand what has previously happened at that site, which products are associated with it and whether other related interactions already exist. This does not mean that information should be freely shared between everyone associated with a site. Privacy, consent and access controls remain important. The point is that the organisation itself should be able to recognise when multiple interactions belong to a shared context.

One customer, many sites — and why personalization breaks

The relationship becomes more complex when viewed from the other direction. A single customer may be associated with two or more sites. Someone may own multiple homes or be involved in different projects at different locations. Their relationship with the brand at each site can be entirely different. One property may have completed its journey, while another may be at the very beginning. If all of this activity is viewed only through a single customer profile, the organisation sees one long history of purchases and interactions. But that is not necessarily how the customer's requirements exist in the real world.

This becomes particularly relevant when it comes to personalization. Consider a customer who purchased certain products for one home several months ago and is now beginning work on another property. A traditional customer profile may identify them as someone who has already purchased those products and build future communication around that history. But the previous purchase may have nothing to do with what the customer needs today. The context has changed because the site has changed.

That is why the question behind personalization may need to evolve. Instead of asking only what should be marketed to a particular customer, the organisation can ask what is relevant to that customer for the site they are currently engaging with. The difference may appear small, but it introduces an entirely different layer of context into the decision. A person's purchase history no longer needs to be treated as one continuous journey. It can be understood as a set of relationships across different sites, each with its own products, interactions and requirements.

Beyond homes: finding the missing entity

The larger takeaway goes beyond homes. Customer One View has become an important part of enterprise data strategy because it addresses a genuine problem: the same person should not exist as disconnected identities across multiple systems. But the customer is not necessarily the only entity that matters to every business. Depending on the industry, another shared entity may carry equally important context. It could be a household, a property, a vehicle, a project, an account or a physical site. The right model depends on how the business actually interacts with its customers.

For us, the site emerged as that missing layer. Once we started looking at the relationships through the site rather than treating it as just an address, several disconnected problems began to make more sense. Multiple customers could be understood as part of the same site journey. A single customer's activity across multiple homes could be separated into meaningful contexts. Products could be connected to where they actually belonged. And personalization could move beyond simply knowing who the customer is.

That is ultimately what we mean by a Site Digital Twin. It is not a digital replica built for the sake of technology. It is a way of representing a real-world relationship that enterprise data systems often fail to capture clearly. The people, products and interactions already exist. The challenge is bringing them together around the context that connects them.

Customer One View tells an organisation who its customer is. A Digital Twin of the site adds another question: where does this customer's journey exist, and who or what else is part of it?

For businesses where the answer to that question matters, the site may be far more than an address. It may be the missing piece in understanding the customer in the first place.