What Is Customer 360 and Why Is It Important?

Imagine a customer engaging with your brand through various channels – replies to social media posts, calls, and emails. Each channel might paint a part of the picture. But without a complete view, you might miss vital information, and the customer narrative remains fragmented. Any team in your company that interacts with customers, be it Sales, Marketing, or Customer Service, needs a centralised source of information to run their operations efficiently.

Enter Customer 360 as a solution to this complex puzzle. It promises a seamless, all-around customer view – a portrait that can dramatically alter outcomes.

A comprehensive 360-degree view of the customer is paramount for unlocking a positive customer experience and providing service teams with actionable insights. From a marketing perspective, it enables targeted and personalised campaigns, while from a sales standpoint, it facilitates a better understanding of customer needs, fostering more informed and effective sales interactions.

In this article, we’ll explore the ins and outs of Customer 360, learn about its components, and discuss how it resolves customer data management problems.

What is Customer 360?

Customer 360 is a holistic approach to understanding the customer experience, moving beyond simple data collection. The system combines multiple sources of information and customer touchpoints for your business. They cover things like:

• Transactional details
• Social media activity
• Demographic profiles

The 360-degree view approach binds them together into an interconnected ecosystem that gives businesses a comprehensive 360-degree view of their customer's journey.

The framework is dynamic and evolving. You can use the approach to gain valuable insights into how customers interact with your business across all channels. As a result, you will have the data to optimise marketing campaigns or tailor your product offerings for the best outcomes.

Customer 360 Components

Creating a total view of the customers involves meticulously piecing together data to achieve a clear and actionable customer profile. The most frequently used components include:

• Data collection: This stage gathers varied customer data, from basic contact information to detailed purchasing behavior, providing a starting point for customer analysis.
• Touchpoint mapping: Understanding customer engagement through multiple channels such as social media, e-commerce, and physical interactions informs a complete touchpoint landscape.
• Data integration: Bringing disparate data sets together is crucial. The goal is to forge a singular view from multiple data sources.
• Data processing: Once data is collected, the system curates and organises it. The data processing components then transform raw data into a structured format ready for use.
• Identity resolution: Linking and deducing customer identities across platforms is vital for a unified customer perspective.
• Account and contact management: Centralising account and contact information is fundamental for tracking and anticipating customer interactions.
• Data enrichment: Regularly updating customer profiles with externally sourced data ensures the depth and relevance of customer information.
• Profile assessment: Monitoring the completeness of customer data enables focused enhancements and targeted data gathering where necessary.

Each of these is valuable on its own, but together, creates a much more robust understanding of the customer journey.

How Does Customer 360 Solve Problems Related to Customer Data?

Customer 360 initiatives provide a strategy to improve the quality and utility of customer data. Here's how it solves your prevalent data management challenges:

Combines and standardises various data sources

The method establishes a singular, consistent customer database. It starts with syncing information across all IT systems. The approach promotes consistency in customer interactions across different channels.

Improves data quality

The all-inclusive approach works to correct and consolidate how a customer's data may appear in various systems. For instance, your existing systems might record "Anne-Marie Co." in one database with "AMC Company" in another. In contrast, 360-degree customer management ensures clarity and consistency in customer identity.

Eliminates data redundancies

Similarly, it aims to detect and combine records that may have been entered into the system more than once, reducing clutter and confusion.

Enables external data integration

A standardised customer data framework makes it possible to incorporate external information sources effectively, providing a more rounded view of the customer.

Benefits of 360-degree Customer View

A complete view of customer information opens the door to numerous benefits for a business. Here are six key advantages:

1. Better customer insight

A complete view of customer behavior helps predict customer needs and preferences. Your business will be able to use the insights to forge stronger connections. For instance, knowing a customer's purchase history helps you predict future needs and optimise your offerings to match that.

2. Tailored marketing efforts

A 360-degree customer view helps you analyse a customer’s journey from start to finish. Businesses can create targeted campaigns that resonate better and drive more sales. For example, Creatio lets you segment customers based on their interactions and preferences.

3. Streamlined customer service

The method lets you gain access to a customer's entire interaction history. It translates to faster, personalised, and more relevant support. Service agents can access historical records of past cases and complaints, enabling them to deliver prompt and efficient resolutions.

4. Effective data management

Detecting duplicates and enriching profiles ensures the database is up-to-date and comprehensive. This makes every customer interaction more meaningful.

5. Increased operational efficiency

A unified customer database simplifies processes, saving time and reducing errors. Your marketing, sales, and customer support teams will find all relevant data available before making every interaction. It will contribute substantially to enhancing your business’s operational efficiency.

6. Timely and data-backed decision-making

Analysing customer data with advanced analytics tools offers insights into customer trends and growth opportunities. Customisable dashboards keep critical metrics in focus for informed strategy planning.

Customer 360 View Integration Challenges

A 360-degree view of customers is powerful, but to make it successful, you’ll need to overcome a set of hurdles.

Here are five integration challenges your team might face:

• Data scattered in many places: Without proper organisation, data spread across different systems and formats makes it hard to see one clear picture of the customer.
• Too much tech, not enough hands: Think of having a big project but not enough builders. On many occasions, it will require manual effort to fix these problems. Because of this, IT departments often face the task of linking tons of data and systems without enough people or the right tools.
• The race against time: The business world moves fast. So, if you’re taking too long to blend data, your business may risk losing out to quicker competitors. For example, you may miss timely promotional campaigns without a complete view of your customers.
• Old methods can't keep up: Using old maps for new roads doesn't work well. IT teams need modern, flexible tools to handle today's complex data and grow with future needs.

Role of Customer 360 in Digital Transformation

With projected spending soaring from 1.6 trillion U.S. dollars in 2022 to an anticipated 3.4 trillion by 2026, digital transformation is reshaping businesses at an unprecedented pace.

It's using digital technology to create new – or modify existing – business processes, culture, and customer experiences to meet changing business and market requirements.

Here’s how having a complete view of your customers plays a pivotal role in this sweeping change:

• Know what customers will buy next: Use historical shopping data to anticipate customers' future purchases and proactively align your inventory to meet their preferences, ensuring you are ready to offer exactly what the customer is looking for.
• Help every customer in a personal way: When businesses understand their customers well, they can make their shopping feel special. This keeps customers happy and coming back.
• Make smart choices: Customer 360 empowers businesses to leverage customer information for informed decision-making regarding product offerings and sales strategies.
• Work better and faster: The Customer 360 methodology seamlessly integrates information from various facets of a business, fostering streamlined operations and time efficiency.
• Improve your service: The ability to quickly check the history of your communication with a customer and their previous requests sets your customer service team up for success. It eliminates the need for additional questions, ensuring fast response and resolution of customers’ issues.
• Enhance your marketing: You can easily segment your audience and personalise marketing campaigns based on customers’ preferences, behavior, and history that are available through Customer 360.

Consolidate Your Customer Data with Creatio

Creatio enables you to create a complete, 360-degree view of the customer by aggregating and integrating data from various touchpoints and interactions with the customer. Within Creatio, all customer data is consolidated in a unified and detailed customer profile for convenient accessibility and comprehensive insights.

Moreover, it gives you a consistent and unified view of your customers across Marketing, Service, and Sales platforms, enabling you to track the entire customer journey and provide the most personalised omnichannel customer engagements.

Let's dive deeper into the features of Creatio Customer 360:

• Complete customer information: The platform ensures that your customer database is comprehensive and up-to-date. It manages a range of customer information including contacts, communication preferences, addresses, and professional background, enabling input from different departments that interact with customers.
• Dynamic customer segmentation: Creatio employs dynamic segmentation, automatically populating segments based on defined parameters. This functionality allows for the creation of specific target groups based on various criteria, facilitating precise and targeted marketing campaigns.
• Timeline-based relationship building: You can capture and display the history of customer interactions in a chronological timeline. This feature provides valuable insights into communication patterns and engagement history, allowing for more contextually relevant and informed interactions.
• Customisable dashboards: Creatio Customer 360 offers customisable dashboards that allow users to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to their specific roles and objectives.
• Flexible data import and export tools: The platform simplifies data sharing across different resources through flexible import and export tools. This capability streamlines data management processes, ensuring seamless integration and utilisation of customer information across the organisation.

By leveraging these features, Creatio Customer 360 empowers businesses to efficiently manage customer data, foster personalised relationships, and drive impactful engagements throughout the customer lifecycle.

Final Thoughts

In a world where customer relationships define success, the Customer 360 view emerges as the compass guiding businesses toward personalised, predictive, and profound connections. It's not just about data; it's the commitment to understanding, anticipating, and surpassing customer needs.

Embracing this comprehensive perspective isn't just a choice; it's imperative for businesses to thrive amidst evolving demands.

Creatio's unique architecture elevates the Customer 360 view by consolidating all CRM products onto a single, no-code-powered platform, providing a unified and seamless experience that streamlines processes, improves collaboration, and delivers comprehensive insights across the entire customer journey.