Customer 360º view in Digital age

In today’s digital age of customer hyper-personalization, organizations identify opportunities for real time engagement based on data-driven understanding of customer behavior.

Customers have taken control of their purchase process. With websites, blogs, Facebook updates, online reviews and more, they use multiple sources of information to make decisions and often engage with a brand dozens of times between inspiration and purchase.

It’s important that organizations collect every customer interaction in order to identify sentiments of happy & unhappy customers.

Companies can get a complete 360º view of customers by aggregating data from the various touch points that a customer may use, to contact a company to purchase products and receive service/support.

This Customer 360º snapshot should include:

• Identity: name, location, gender, age and other demographic data
• Relationships: their influence, connections, associations with others
• Current activity: orders, complaints, deliveries, returns
• History: contacts, campaigns, processes, cases across all lines of business and channels
• Value: which products or services they are associated with, including history
• Flags: prompts to give context, e.g. churn propensity, up-sell options, fraud risk, mood of last interactions, complaint record, frequency of contact
• Actions: expected, likely or essential steps based on who they are and the fact they are calling now

The 360º view of customers, also often requires a big data analytics strategy to marry structured data (data that can reside in the rows and columns of a database), with unstructured data (data like audio files, video files, social media data). 

Many companies like Nestle, Toyota are using social media listening tools to gather what customers are saying on sites like Facebook and Twitter, predictive analytics tools to determine what customers may research or purchase next.

What are the returns of Customer 360º:

• All customer touch point data in a single repository for fast queries
• Next best actions or recommendations for customers
• All key metrics in a single location for business users to know and advise customers
• Intuitive and customizable dashboards for quick insights
• Real time hyper personalized customer interaction
• Enhanced customer loyalty

Customer 360º helps achieve Single View of Customer across Channels – online, stores, marketplaces, Devices – wearables, mobile, tablets, laptops & Interactions – purchase, posts, likes, feedback, service.

This is further used for customer analytics – predict churn, retention, next best action, cross-sell & up-sell opportunities, profitability, life time value.

Global leaders in customer experience are Apple, Disney, Emirates.

A word of caution though - Focus & collect only that customer data, which can help to improve the customer journey.