3 Things You Can Do to Achieve a 360° Customer View

But how can you find out exactly what your customers want? The answer lies with one key tool - a 360° customer view.

360° customer views collate a wealth of data to give accurate insights into customer needs, wants and desires so that businesses can better target their marketing efforts, and as a result, achieve greater success with their campaigns.

In this post, we'll define a 360° customer view, its benefits, and show you how to create your own.

What is a 360° customer view?

A 360° customer view is a singular and comprehensive view of a customer’s data.

Perhaps the most important element of a 360° customer view is the data that it contains. 360° customer views contain data like basic contact information, past/present purchase history and information on the interactions made between consumer and business touchpoints throughout the customer journey.

The benefits of a 360° customer view

360° customer views provide a multitude of benefits for businesses - their foundation of data helps improve efficiency through tailored marketing which leads to lower costs, and improves customer relationships through the ability to deliver more personalized experiences. The three key benefits of a 360° customer view include:

1. Predictive analytics

360° customer views allow you to analyze  the data from what your customers have done in the past, to predict what they are likely to do in the future.

The accuracy of this information better positions companies to take advantage of churn, cross-sell or upsell opportunities, as well as provide them with an insightful look into future growth. Predictive analysis can also help identify where service offerings may need to be adapted to engage more customers and how to mitigate the impact of future changes on customers.

2. Enhanced personalization

360° customer views offer businesses significant advantages in providing personalized experiences.

With a holistic customer view, businesses have complete access to information like purchase history and browsing habits. When connected to marketing channels that can activate campaigns based on this data, this results in more personalized product recommendations and more meaningful customer engagement that boosts brand loyalty and LTVs (lifetime  order values) while reducing customer churn.

3. Improved customer experiences

One of the top benefits of 360° customer views is their ability to help nurture stronger customer experiences.

Many businesses only use information taken from a customer’s most recent interaction as a means of building the customer’s future experience.

However, this sells the business short by failing to provide a complete picture of the customer relationship because it doesn’t take into account previous customer interactions with different touchpoints or relevant past transactions. For example, an ecommerce business might end up retargeting a visitor with display ads for recently-browsed products, even though the visitor has since purchased them.

360° customer views prevent information from becoming siloed—the key contributor to fragmented customer experiences—by storing a complete overview of the customer’s data in a single, easily accessible location available to multiple departments.

3 things you can do to achieve a 360° customer view

1. Conduct a data audit

The most successful 360° customer views are built using a wide spectrum of high-quality data that is both relevant and accurate. To ensure this, data should be cleaned and organized. This is where a data audit comes into play.

Data audits should follow a process where all departments enter their information into an easily understandable and accessible format which is consistent across multiple entries. The consistency should continue across any different systems being used currently (and historically, if it’s possible) to increase efficiency in the future.

While data audits are time consuming, the process ensures accuracy and relevancy by identifying any correlations between otherwise fragmented pieces of data (for example, two users who are unconnected but may have overlapping interests).

2. Use a customer data platform

Whilst there are lots of digital marketing tools that can help grow your business they can also case data silos and hinder your customer view. Customer Data Platforms help to build 360° customer views by aggregating and organizing customer data collected from an array of customer journey touchpoints. The collected data is then structured and individualized into central customer profiles, where it’s free to be accessed by other systems, departments and MarTech tools.

CDPs can also combine data from a variety of different data types, including first, second and third party sources. This means CDPs can collect and organize data from CRMs, DMPs, emails, social media activities and websites and transactional systems (like cookies, forms and ecommerce behavioral activities) and use this to create complete, holistic customer profiles.

3. Make the most of your CDP data

Because CDPs collect data from numerous sources, the amount of vital information at a business's disposal makes it imperative that they use and unify the data to build comprehensive customer views.

When built through a CDP, 360° customer views equip businesses to better manage customer relationships, and market to both new and existing audiences more effectively.

The data found in a CDP can construct identity graphs of customers and analyze their behavior, enabling businesses to foster meaningful interactions through enriching their marketing collateral with personalized offers or recommendations.

The ever-changing landscape of customer needs and expectations means that brands who fail to create authentic customer connections will lose out on market share.