All of us have our own unique and ever-growing digital footprints. This is why a business faces an ever-increasing pool of knowledgeable and digitally enlightened buyers. This creates many challenges and also offers a huge number of possibilities. 360-degree customer view – review–
As this digital tail grows, the brands who follow and capture it have a pool of priceless data about their customers through their digital choices and trail.
This data not only allows you to understand your consumers better but also deliver a positive experience and provide a platform for success in the long-term and growth in business. And, one key ingredient you need is a 360 degree view of the customer to make this happen effectively. Let’s understand and discuss this in detail.
What is a 360 degree view of a customer?
In easy terms, it is a collection of all of your customer data in one place. It is a collation of data starting from customer’s contact information, data from their purchasing habits and customer service interactions, as well as their activity on social media, and their interactions on your websites and mobile apps.
It is a relationship cycle consisting of many touch-points where a customer comes in contact with a brand or a business. Out of the many, some interactions transform into purchases or marketing communications, through social media or through customer service.
Having a great product is not the only unique selling point of a brand, but after sales service or customer service has an equally important role to play. This is why having access to interactions with customer service, like requests, inquiries, and complaints, etc. is essential to get a complete overall view of a customer.
A survey conducted by Forrester Research in 2018 revealed that more than 40% of service agents were not able to resolve customer’s issues appropriately due to lack of complete user information.
At the same time about 45% of customers stated lack of promptness and overall support as the reason for them to abandon a transaction.
Moreover, research done by Gartner indicates that less than 10% of businesses actually have a 360-degree view and about only about half of them are able to use a 360-degree view for business growth.
When you collect information on each of the contact points in a360 degree relationship cycle, then you will know your customers well enough and this will help you get a better view of your customers’ choices and needs.
For a better understanding on the same let’s discuss 5 major ways a 360 degree customer view can grow your business.
1. Improved customer intelligence
A detailed 360-degree view of your customers will let you work on an efficient customer management strategy. Mostly a “recency bias” could influence the way we deal with a customer, resulting in relying on the latest conversation with a customer.
However, the last conversation or contact does not provide a detailed picture of their relationship, and has a high chance to take you through the wrong path and even miss out on an opportunity for sale.
Again, it must be noted that a customer relationship is not only about marketing or sales. Customer service has a major role to play in it. Without a well inter-connected system it becomes very difficult to provide good after sales service.
A proper and well-designed Customer Relationship Management (CRM)or Customer Data Platform (CDP) application lets you track all the contacts of your customers. But many such CRM or CDP systems miss out on tracking online channel interactions.
So, make sure to build a layer on top of your CRM or CDP to ensure a true 360-degree view. The presence of all online and offline interactions in one place will let you have a better picture. This will also facilitate consistency in customer experience across all the channels and departments.
2. Improved collaboration and inter-department campaigns
Another major plus-point of this is better inter-departmental collaboration, for example between, sales, marketing and service. The same customer view using a common CRM or CDP tool between them means information is readily available to all. At the same time these departments can strategize more powerful campaigns using a data-driven approach.
As an example, a recent study by Aberdeen Group, CMO’s agenda, indicates aligning sales and marketing,
- 32% more revenue can be generated.
- 36% more customers can be retained.
- 38% higher win rates can be achieved.
3. Improved predictive analysis
A 360-degree view will not only help you see what your customers have done, but it also will let you understand their future moves. With all customer data in one place, it will allow you to have better forecasts and predictive analysis.
A complete picture of the customer’s situation with their accounts, transactions, priorities, preferences, service calls and social media platforms will let you predict their upcoming needs in the future.
This approach will also let you forecast customer behavior towards your planned changes thus allowing you to prepare, anticipate, and improvise your strategy to minimize negative impact and maximize positive.
4. Better personalization resulting in profit
With a 360-degree view of customers and access to a complete history of their purchases and the habits, you can make more suitable product recommendations on any channel the customer chooses to interact. This lets you engage meaningfully with them, and builds trust.
This also helps to build brand loyalty.
5. Become Privacy Compliant
With GDPR, CCPA and many other data privacy regulations, brands have to ensure that they have a system in place to effectively manage their customers’ data across both online and offline channels.
A platform that helps you maintain the 360-degree view of the customer could help you ensure that your brand is in compliance with these rapidly evolving data privacy regulations and could help you easily serve your customers’ data access requests.
Retaining existing customers is as important as getting new ones for sustainable business growth. Timely and relevant communication is most important for maintaining customer relationships. An effective solution that enhances your CRM or CDP will help you gain a 360-degree view of the customer along with their journey with your brand.
