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Today’s customers put a great emphasis on personalization. They want businesses to provide a customized experience according to their likes and preferences.
This demand once used to be quite a hectic task, but thanks to concepts like 360-degree view, it is easier than ever to offer personalized services.
This article will talk about the 360-degree view and how it can help your business make a mark, answering questions such as :
- What is 360-degree customer view?
- What does a 360-degree customer view tell?
- Why is a 360-degree customer view so important?
- How can I achieve 360-degree customer view?
WHAT IS 360-DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW?
A 360-degree view of the customer is an end-to-end, single picture of a customer’s experience and journey with a company. It highlights the different stages of the journey and how the customer felt at each step.
Moreover, a 360-degree client view means a strategy to enable businesses to offer customers the best experience across all channels. It allows different touchpoints to come together, allowing the business to ensure customer satisfaction at every stage of the process.
Businesses need a 360-degree client view to aid their customers. Companies employ various techniques, including customer interactions and feedback, to get the soft and hard customer data underlying the 360-degree customer view.
| Hard Data | Soft Data | |
|---|---|---|
| What Is It? | Hard data provides businesses with a customer’s contact center facts. It highlights why a customer made a specific purchase and how he or she got in touch with the company.
Businesses need to know this kind of customer information given customers to purchase goods and services online and in a brick-and-mortar store. Plus, customers can use various media, including emails, phone calls, mobile devices, and desktop computers. So, a customer 360-degree view from hard data helps businesses know his or her’s preferred contact mode. |
Soft data, a less visible part of hard data, tells a business about how a customer felt when he or she got in touch with the business. It answers questions like:
* Was the customer satisfied with the product? Besides providing a client’s 360-degree view, soft data contributes to a 360-degree view of business products and services. Soft data lacks visibility and takes some creativity to extract it, using different tools and tactics. |
| Where Does It Come From? | Businesses gather hard data through various means, including online accounts, transactions, and preferences. Most companies record all kinds of interactions they have with customers, including phone calls and online chats.
Humans and computer devices, like the Internet of Things (IoT), collect hard data. This hard data provides the foundation of a client’s 360-degree view, a picture of a customer’s behavior as he or she interacts with business products and services. |
A business obtains soft data from its subtleties in hard data. For example, a business records a customer sent an email, hard data describing communication medium. When a business analyzes email contents, it will understand customer feelings around a product or service.
Soft data is essential as it comes together with hard data to give an accurate 360-degree view of a customer. It tells a business about how a customer feels about their product. Plus, it helps all the departments. |
| Why Is It Important? | Businesses use hard data to get in touch with customers and turn customers into long-term clients. It also allows them to offer a personalized experience to customers by providing them exactly what they want. | Businesses can use this information to improve products and services and get a better client 360-degree view. Plus, when a company uses soft data well, the buyer experience becomes customized. |
| How Is This Data Handled? | Businesses use various software, typically known as customer relationship management (CRM), to keep hard data safe and secure. Employees have to update this data now and then, ensuring they provide the best services to all their customers, including potential clients. | Some businesses have individuals who go through all chats and emails to collect data. However, since big companies have tons of daily correspondence, it may not be feasible to hire a team to look into soft data. Companies solve the problem by often using bots and software to grasp the tone of a message. |
WHAT DOES A 360-Degree Customer View TELL?
Like a crystal ball, a 360-degree customer view gives excellent insights into the present, past, and future.
The Past:
The client 360-view shows his or her interactions with your services or products in the past. You will be able to see a customer’s buying history, including:
- Service or product activity
- All past interactions
- Product views
- Process history
- Marketing and sales campaign activity
The Present
Present data gives a customer a 360-degree view that gauges where a client stands in the buying cycle. Organizations get information such as:
- The background of the buyer
- Current or pending queries or issues related to the customer service
- The context behind customer-business interactions
- The customer’s involvement with the organization
- Current or pending customer orders
The Future
A client’s 360-degree view, comprised of past and present data, offers insights into the future. When you start a business, you want to grow it, using data from a client 360 view for the long haul.
A company uses the customer data they have gathered to build long-term relationships with clients. Moreover, the business finds tools and information to cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
WHY IS A 360-DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW SO IMPORTANT?
A 360-degree view of a customer provides a business with a lot of valuable information that can benefit it in the long run. Four benefits of a 360-degree customer view include customer alignment, improvements in predictive analysis, customer loyalty, and improvements to the bottom line.
Customer Alignment
A business needs customer alignment for long-term relationships and to retain clients through necessary steps. After all, it is easier to retain a client than it is to gain a client.
Businesses can achieve customer alignment by using a reliable CRM tool that gives a 360-degree customer view. Such a tool promotes easy sharing of information between departments and streamlines business processes to better customer experience.
Improvements in Predictive Analysis
A business relies on predictions, such as the expected number of buyers and when a product or service will be in high demand. Incorrect analysis can lead to significant problems, including wastage of resources and shortages.
Having access to valuable and reliable information from a 360-degree client view gives a business the foundation to make educated predictions more easily. A company can learn:
- How likely their customers are to purchase a product or service.
- How likely their customers are to cancel a purchase or return a product.
The client’s 360-degree view reveals behavioural information and demographic knowledge, giving a business valuable information regarding user responses and broader trends.
Access to such client information will improve predictive analysis, allowing the business to prioritize what’s important.
Customer Loyalty
Today’s customers want the business end-product and have good experiences through the entire customer journey, from the first contact to the repeated business. They want the business to treat them well throughout the buying process. These customer demands make winning and retaining customers challenging for most businesses.
The overall customer experience represents the number one differentiator to keep – well above the product’s price or other economic transaction.
Spending money on gathering customer data for a 360-degree client view can be an investment. But customers prefer to buy from a business that fully caters to them. Plus, some clients may even pay more for a product that offers a personalized experience.
Businesses need to make sure they improve service to keep customers loyal and not just the product. Customers place huge importance on the business delivery of their products and services.
According to reports, a customer is 4x more likely to switch products if he or she is not satisfied with the service. Customer interactions make big of a difference in most cases.
Improvements to the Bottomline
The 360-degree customer view allows businesses to improve ROI on marketing campaigns, thus helping the bottom line. It does so by not only increasing customers but also by reducing costs.
Having access to hard and soft data gives the 360-degree client view needed for a business to decide the best route to reach a customer, thus reducing wastage. For example, suppose you do online marketing, and you know that most of your customers come through Facebook. In that case, you can spend more time and money advertising on Facebook than wasting money on other social media platforms.
A 360-customer view benefits the marketing department and customer service, production, and supply chain departments, among others. Hence, the 360-client view helps the entire business by ensuring all the departments work together to achieve the end goal or bottom line (like satisfied customers or a profitable business).
HOW CAN I ACHIEVE 360 DEGREE CUSTOMER VIEW?
Since a 360-degree customer view relies on good data processes, you will need to take care of the following three factors:
- The Collection of Data: Make sure to collect as much data as you can. Different businesses use different ways to collect data. Find out what works best for you.
- The Management of Data: Correct data management means customer information should be clean and organized. WinPure Clean & Match can be very valuable in this regard. After all, bad customer data can negatively influence your business. Hence, you will find it important to use reliable tools to keep it clean.
- The Analysis of Data: You will find data collection and management useless if you cannot analyze your customer data. Find data scientists to ensure you can gather valuable information from the data you have collected.
Related Reading: Master Data Management Guide
A 360-degree customer view can help your business in a lot of ways.
Contact us today to know more about how we can help you with the process