In the current competitive market, you need to deliver exceptional customer experience to see your business grow. More entrepreneurs turn to a holistic 360-degree view of their customers to gain deeper insights and foster stronger connections. Integrating data from various touchpoints helps you gain better insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and needs. In this blog post, we’ll explore the transformative power of leveraging a 360-degree customer view for enhanced satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth.

Improving your customer experience to make it meaningful and engaging takes much effort and, of course, quite a bit of business data, historical and real-time. A deeper understanding of your customers’ challenges, pain points, and preferences is no longer a choice but a necessity for your business to thrive. Here’s where a 360-degree view of your customer comes into the picture to help you provide top-class customer service, which has never been more crucial than now.

Think from your customer’s perspective. Online customers globally are keen on paying more if they receive amazing, personalized service. As they say, it’s highly possible that your customers will remember your brand because of how you made them feel when they purchased from you. An incredible, personalized customer experience goes a long way toward the success of your business. Whether you are an online retailer, a healthcare provider, a hospitality giant, or a bank, you can do amazingly well for your business with a 360-degree customer view combined with effective predictive analytical insights.

However, achieving a 360-degree view of their customer is not a simple task. A survey of 402 marketing, IT, and enterprise leaders by Gartner in 2022 says that only 14% of organizations succeeded in achieving a 360-degree view of their customers. In contrast, 82% of the respondents confirmed their aspiration to achieve that goal. Let’s dive deep into this interestingly steep goal for the companies.

Understanding the 360-degree Customer View

A 360-degree customer view gives a comprehensive picture of your business, including your customer’s preferences and behavior based on collective data across all the touchpoints. It helps you understand customer preferences and behavior, essential in driving promotional campaigns and improving business processes. Consequently, such a holistic view has become a necessity for effective marketing and customer service strategies.

As we know, there are five different varieties of customer data: demographic, environmental, social, and behavioral. All these are also sources of data that you need to analyze together to get the correct picture instead of looking at them in silos. This holistic view that helps you formulate effective marketing strategies is comprised of the following:

• Consolidated customer data from various touchpoints
• Master data management, ensuring that the data is consistent, accurate, and updated
• Advanced data analytics, including predictive analytics

Significance of Embracing a 360-degree Customer View for Success

Embracing a 360-degree customer view for your business is a strategic approach to enhance customer experience with personalization across unified channels. It adds considerable value to your business by improving marketing efficiency, lowering costs, and increasing retention by strengthening customer relationships.

Some of the advantages of incorporating a 360-degree customer view include the following:

• Enhanced customer experience
• Meaningful customer interaction and engagement
• Better customer retention
• Improved revenue
• Better marketing success
• Superior data quality and accuracy
• Improved operational efficiency

A 360-degree view lets you dig deep into every aspect of your business, including financial, operational, and customer, helping in data-backed, strategic decision-making. You need data pointers for consistent improvement, optimized efficiency, reduced waste, optimum resource utilization, and profitability. Your business can only become innovative if your data is centralized and accessible anytime.

Mastering the 360-degree Customer View

After understanding the benefits and significance of a 360-degree customer view, let’s understand how to build a 360-degree view. We all know that the insights you drive can only be accurate and relevant with high-quality data. Here are some of the crucial elements to build a 360-degree customer view:

• Review Your Data – Audit your data to ensure it is clean and organized. The first step in that direction is to install a centralized platform where everyone enters data irrespective of departments. It should also be consistent across all the systems used currently and, if possible, historically. This process will maintain consistency and ensure the relevancy of the data.
• Leverage Customer Data Platform – Customer Data Platform or CDP helps in aggregating and organizing customer data from various touchpoints and makes it easily accessible by other systems, applications, and Martech stacks. It can collect and organize data from diverse sources such as the CRM platform, emails, social media, transaction systems, website forms, cookies, and eCommerce behavior for an all-inclusive view of your customers.
• Utilize Social Listening Tools – This is the best way to understand your customers. It presents you with your customers’ social activities, preferences, and attitudes. You can analyze their browsing and shopping patterns and leverage them as a useful tool to grow your business. It enables you to proactively address their concerns about your products and make them happy about your business.

One example of a 360-degree could be combining purchase data with marketing interactions.