The influence that online reviews and endorsements have on the modern customer is massive. A recent survey found that 97% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase decision. Better customer experiences lead to happier customers and better reviews. Sounds simple right?
The modern customer highly values personalization and wants companies to understand them and tailor their customer service efforts accordingly. In marketing and data analysis, the pursuit of attaining a complete understanding of customers is called a ‘360-degree customer view’ or Customer 360. In this post, we’ll look at how a 360-degree customer view is used by enterprises and how it results in better customer experiences and benefits for your business.
What is a 360-Degree Customer View?
The 360-degree customer view concept used to be deemed technically unattainable. After all, is it possible to know every little detail about the customer? However, data aggregation and analysis methods have made this previously unfeasible concept a reality. And it has become an essential part of modern enterprise CX strategy.
Companies are using all aggregated data about their customers to provide the most customized and effectual customer service possible. This customer-centric approach incorporates past and present data to predict and dictate the future of customers’ relationships with a brand.
Past
In a 360-degree view, the past history of a customer with a company is vital. This data shows:
- Purchase activity and frequency of purchases in the past
- Which products/services the customer has interacted with across all channels
- Campaign activity
- History of comments and reviews
Present
When a potential customer reaches out to the company, regardless of the platform used, the company must be aware of their purchase intentions. Tracking current activities of a user is a process that considers factors such as:
- The identity of the potential customer
- Which channel they got to know about the company
- Their past purchase history
The Future
By assessing the past and present actions of customers, businesses can list their conclusions and chart potential future associations.
It’s possible to correctly predict answers to complicated questions such as:
- What does their search history on the website suggest about their product preferences?
- Does retargeting work on a customer?
- Which filters did the customer use? Is he/she interested in the cheapest or the latest products?
By examining past and present customer behavior, customer service plans can be modified in real-time. Addressing important customer queries in an instant is possible within this 360-degree customer view.
Benefits of a 360-Degree View
The benefits of having algorithms examine every single move made by the customer are endless. While the main benefit of a 360-degree view is providing more nuanced customized experiences through omnichannel engagement, some other benefits include:
Aid Predictive Assessments
By collecting and listing each detail of a customer’s journey with the company, businesses can predict certain behavioral patterns and regularities.
With the help of these patterns, predictive questions such as the following can be answered:
- What is the likelihood of a customer purchasing a product per visit to the company website?
- What categories of products are they most likely to check first? Based on this understanding, your website’s pages can be personalized for each visitor.
- What is their reason for abandoning their cart?
A 360-view draws from each customer’s interaction history and charts out potential scenarios that are most likely to improve their overall customer experience.
Personalized Engagement, Customer Insights, and Segmentation
With a Customer 360 approach, accurate and recent data about each customer is accessible at each touchpoint. Companies can also create massive data sets of customer information and segment them to create precise customer behavior models.
Boost Customer Loyalty
As companies modify their customer experience planning processes, making them more nuanced and informed to specific customer needs, brand loyalty will inherently increase. A lot of people claim that Amazon’s success is solely based on their predatory pricing techniques. But, that’s not the only factor. A key reason why Amazon has been able to become the market leader in eCommerce is that people trust the brand. In a recent survey of US eCommerce customers, 89% of consumers stated that they are more likely to purchase products from Amazon as the company is more reliable than other eCommerce websites. This loyalty has been steadily built via years of dedicated customer service.
Reduce Overall Expenses
Marketing campaigns cost a lot. The ones that fail cost even more. Data-driven marketing campaigns are more likely to be successful. In a survey by Forbes which interviewed some of the world’s top marketing executives, 64% “strongly agreed” that data-driven marketing campaigns are vital to success in a super-competitive economy. With a 360-degree view, companies can develop their customer outreach campaigns in a targeted manner and cut spending on campaigns that fail to perform. Plus, with a 360-degree view, companies can segment their customers on the basis of their value to the company and spend fewer resources on low-value customers.
Customer 360 vs. Single Customer View
A single customer view is a representation of customer inclination. These models sum up all the data a company has about a customer and visually represent it in one page. People confuse it with 360-Degree Customer View since the terms are similar.
The distinction between the two is that while Single Customer View is about presenting customer information in a single template, regardless of how the information is synchronized, 360-Degree Customer View is an approach that scrutinizes and segments each and every piece of customer-related data available to the company.
Creating a Single Customer View is hence easy as it pulls up customer data from various databases without applying Customer 360. However, this data can be out of date or unsynchronized, depending on the sources.
How to Implement Customer 360
Firstly, you will need to determine the informational requirements that you’d like to put into your Customer 360 model. They can include marketing, shipping and delivery records, customer service records, etc. Then, you need to find sources of information. For instance:
- Customer Service – Email records, complaints, etc.
- Marketing – Customer surveys, trade show leads, etc.
- Shipping – Delivery records and delivery ratings
- Sales – CRM systems
A comprehensive Customer 360 project must include data hygiene (source records are cleaned and homogenized) so that the multiple data sources can be evaluated and listed together. Lastly, companies need to create a hub database that contains all of their master records. These records must be easily editable with the source databases.
For example, if a client adds a new credit card number to their account, this information should also be coordinated with all the other databases containing payment-related data. Keeping the master records up to date is vital and provisions must be made to ensure that the process of updating these databases is automated.
Implement a 360-Degree Customer View with Productive Edge
As the commercial sector aims to become more customer-centric, customer data is becoming an invaluable resource for marketers. Businesses must implement comprehensive Customer 360 projects to gain a better understanding of the details that are the essence of their customer base. Not only will this drive better lead generation, but it will also make customer-company relations unbreakable. Even small-scale businesses can adopt this approach by recognizing use cases and developing on them as data analysis methods also improve.
Productive Edge is a leading digital strategy and technology consulting firm specializing in helping enterprises implement customer 360 views that help drive revenue and create a better customer experience. To learn more about how Productive Edge can help your business implement Customer 360, contact us to book a consultation.
