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Don’t worry, this article won’t make you relive your geometry class nightmares. Despite the title’s implications, there won’t be any math involved. Jokes apart! We understand that your customers are the foundation of your business, but do you truly know their identities and how they engage with your brand?
Gain comprehensive insights by adopting a 360-degree customer view approach. This in-depth analysis goes beyond surface-level understanding, encompassing their past, present, and even future behaviors. By truly grasping who your customers are, you can not only meet but exceed their needs and expectations.
Although we may believe that we understand our customers’ desires because of regular interactions, sometimes it falls short. That’s why gathering multiple perspectives and leveraging all available data is crucial before making strategic decisions. This post will delve into the concept of a 360-degree view of the customer, explaining its significance, why it is necessary, and providing guidance on how you can construct your own.
It represents a holistic perspective of customer information, derived from consolidating data from all touchpoints with the brand. This all-encompassing data serves as the fundamental pillar in comprehending customers and is essential for any customer analysis process.
“It is a strategic methodology that empowers businesses to deliver optimal customer experiences across multiple channels. This is achieved by providing a unified and integrated perspective of all customer touchpoints.”
In a highly competitive world, merely selling a product and keeping customers at a distance is insufficient. You have to take a customer-centric approach here for your company. Striving to comprehend customers without intruding on their space is a virtue that every company aspires to possess. This practice not only fosters a positive customer relationship but also ensures a top-notch, unparalleled experience for them.
The domain of data science has experienced tremendous growth in recent years. Each interaction between a customer and an organization generates a valuable pool of data, which can be harnessed for additional insights.
By capturing and transforming this data into meaningful information, you can make profound discoveries about your customers. This enables you to enhance your positioning in the market and, crucially, anticipate the evolving needs of your customers well in advance.
I hope you are clear now! Let’s explore the importance of having a customer 360-degree view.
Having a 360-degree view of customer data provides your team with complete visibility into the customer’s distinct relationship with your brand and its offerings. Instead of relying on a single data point, like the immediate customer issue, your agents gain access to a wealth of information, empowering them to provide personalized service effectively.
In today’s landscape, personalized shopping experiences are increasingly preferred by consumers. Accenture’s research indicates that 91% of consumers are inclined to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations tailored to their preferences.
By consolidating all customer data into a 360-degree view, you gain comprehensive knowledge of each customer, allowing easy access to their past activities and interactions with your company. This contextual understanding empowers your service team to personalize each interaction, efficiently finding the most suitable solutions to identify customer needs for each one.
Furthermore, with personalized service experience, it is highly probable that customer loyalty will be extended, as it nurtures a sense of trust and reliability in the relationship.
Customer intelligence plays a vital role in enabling your service representatives to excel in their roles. Equipped with the complete story of a customer, your team members can swiftly address and resolve customer issues.
For instance, as a customer, I often experience frustration when companies transfer me between multiple agents. This process consumes valuable time, and I frequently find myself having to repeat my case to each representative.
These unproductive interactions have adverse effects on three key aspects: the consumer’s time, his patience, and your company’s resources. However, these issues can be avoided by consolidating all client data in one central location. By having access to each consumer’s inquiries, it simplifies the process for both the consumer and your support representatives. Your support team can efficiently and effectively address the core of a problem, leading to increased customer satisfaction.
Collecting extensive customer information can significantly enhance your company’s predictive analytics capabilities. Through such analysis, you can extract valuable insights about your customers by analyzing their past and current behaviors, also predict their future requirements.
This proactive approach will keep you ahead of the game, allowing you to be well-prepared to meet customer expectations. It may even open opportunities for offering relevant services through upselling or cross-selling.
Additionally, predictive analytics can illuminate how different stages of the buyer’s journey might either deter or attract customers, guiding you in taking necessary steps to enhance their overall experience. At a broader level, these predictions can significantly enhance your company’s strategy. For instance, the invaluable insights derived from customer data can be utilized to improve upcoming campaigns and new updates, effectively addressing customer pain points.
The data within a 360-degree view can also aid in predicting a customer’s next likely actions. By having access to essential information like his transactions, interactions, and preferences, you can discern patterns in his behavior. This valuable insight enables you to make more informed decisions about his future needs and presents opportunities for effective upselling or cross-selling.
Anticipating customer wants and desires can have a substantial impact on improving customer retention and support service. With access to 360-degree views, your support team can tailor their approach, providing a more seamless experience. Armed with this comprehensive knowledge, they won’t be navigating unfamiliar territory.
Instead, they will be aware of any previous mishaps or challenges the customer may have faced, allowing them to avoid repeating similar incidents that could potentially lead to losing customers.
Regardless of the channel they choose to engage with, customers expect a consistent and high level of service. Whether they reach out through a messaging app or interact with a chatbot, they desire to feel understood and valued. Ensuring your customers feel acknowledged involves offering omnichannel support—a cohesive and uniform customer experience across all the communication platforms.
Having a 360-degree customer view will aid your team in handling conversations with customers across various channels. This comprehensive view consolidates all the necessary information in a centralized location, eliminating the need to search through separate databases. As a result, support agents and customers alike can enjoy a better and more streamlined experience.
Having customer data readily available empowers team members to collaborate more effectively. With comprehensive knowledge about customers, their origin, and previous interactions with your company, everyone gains valuable context. This eliminates confusion among your teams and saves customers from having to repeat themselves every time while talking to your team members on a different communication platform.
Customer behaviors hold more significance in defining them than their demographics. To obtain a comprehensive understanding, the key lies in how you integrate customer data. Now that you’re aware of the benefits of 360-degree views for your company, it’s time to craft your own. Construct a comprehensive and holistic image of your customers by following these steps.
A CRM acts as the optimal storage hub for all your customer data, making it the ideal resource to track every interaction a customer has with your organization. In each customer profile, record vital details such as his past transactions, inquiries, and any other type of interaction. It is crucial to regularly update these 360-degree views in your CRM after every new interaction.
Granting CRM access to all other customer-serving departments (such as sales and marketing) is highly beneficial to ensure seamless communication with customers. By doing so, everyone is on the same page, leaving little to no room for error while dealing with a specific customer.
Want to get 2 benefits from a single tool? Opt for live chat software. It not only lets your support team provide instant assistance to your customers on different support channels like websites, mobile apps, and other social media platforms but also provides analytics regarding your customers like their demographics, past visits, interactions, etc. to get an idea about their preferences and choices. The best part is this live chat software can also be integrated with your existing CRM.
Many live chat tools are available in the market, but I recommend REVE Chat. Apart from providing live chat assistance, it also offers an AI-based chatbot named REVE Chatbot to automate your whole business operations including customer service.
REVE Chat offers a 14-day FREE TRIAL to try out all its unique features. Want to have a look? SIGN UP here.
In addition to traditional interactions, customer behavior on social media is a significant aspect. Social listening entails the practice of monitoring and observing discussions related to your company or various relevant topics on different social media platforms.
Social listening holds immense value because social media platforms often serve as outlets where people share unfiltered opinions. This candid feedback can prove to be very important for your company. Moreover, you can utilize their opinions and reviews while creating or updating your business strategies, enhancing accuracy and enabling you to concentrate your marketing and sales efforts more effectively.
So, you’re all set to start creating customer profiles with the upcoming interactions, right? However, don’t forget about your existing data.
Whatever you do, avoid wiping your historical data. Instead, take your time to organize those details as well and associate them with the relevant customers. Other departments gather customer information too, so make sure to collect those details as well and integrate them into your 360-degree views.
If you are not using any CRM to automatically organize your customer-related data, then get one system for entering and editing those critical data. This practice will guarantee effortless and seamless access to all the details in the future.
Before embarking on data collection, it’s wise to plan where you will store it to ensure coherence and manageability. Without the appropriate infrastructure, crucial information may be overlooked or isolated in silos.
Establish a unified customer data platform that facilitates effortless collection, storage, and sharing of customer information across your entire company. A customer relationship management (CRM) or customer support software such as REVE Chat is often a common choice for capturing and organizing this type of information.
No matter the location you select to store your data, ensure its easily accessible to all the departments across your company. This accessibility should allow them to add vital details to specific customer profiles whenever required.
Even if you already possess a great collection of customer profiles, it’s likely that some of it might be outdated or irrelevant. For instance, your lead forms may not include an address or email information. To enhance your data, a great approach is to conduct additional customer research, with customer feedback being one of the valuable sources to supplement and enrich your existing information.
One of the most effective methods to gather new information is by engaging directly with your customers. By seeking feedback from your buyers regarding their opinions about your brand and suggestions for improvement, you gain a deeper understanding of their needs and challenges. Utilize surveys, questionnaires, polls, different tools, etc. as valuable resources to collect this information.
A 360-degree view of a customer is a comprehensive and holistic perspective that encompasses all relevant information and interactions with the customer. Such as:
Suppose a visitor comes to your website. He is going through several web pages there. Now you must be eager to know more about him. Well, that’s beneficial for your business too. customer 360 view helps you out here.
If you use REVE Chat, you can get this information easily. REVE Chat is an omnichannel customer engagement platform that offers detailed information on your website visitors by integrating seamlessly with your website, mobile app, and other social media platforms like Facebook, Viber, Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp. It also offers real-time assistance on each of these platforms and enables you to offer 24/7 automated customer service through its AI-powered chatbot.
REVE Chat offers various information related to your website visitors like their geographical locations, page visits, past chat history, and other important contact details. Equipped with all such vital information, you can easily personalize your communication and proactively reach out to him through REVE Chat to offer instant support much before he even asks for it.
Also, you can integrate REVE Chat with your existing CRM system and manage everything from one place. Want to give it a try? SIGN UP for its 14-day free trial today.
Keep in mind that a 360-degree customer view is an ongoing process. Continually gather new information about your buyers, regularly test and measure your results, and iterate frequently to deliver an exceptional support experience that enhances customer satisfaction.
Finally, after the deal is won, it is transferred to the customer success team. As a customer success personnel, your focus should be on delivering seamless customer experiences. This can only be achieved when you have access to all customer details like their interactions, transaction history, etc. personalize communications effectively.
Indeed, when utilized correctly, a 360-degree customer view proves to be a great advantage. It is employed by various departments within a business and becomes exceptionally valuable if used with the right tool.
Well, the challenges may differ depending on your industry and business type. The common obstacles you may face are:
When you get all the vital details of your customers like their requirements, preferences, problems and opinions, you can easily use those data to improve your services and bring more personalization to your products to meet the customer needs.
The 360-degree customer view data model provides all the important data related to your customers from different touchpoints. Once you get to know your customers deeply, you can customize your product offerings to serve them in a better way. This is a great approach to win the race against your competitors by offering best-in-class services, and experiences.
Yes, no matter what your business size is, if you follow it correctly you can definitely win the race. Understanding your customers will always help you to improve your product offerings, customer service, and other sales and marketing activities.
There are CRM systems available that offer integration capabilities to consolidate all the data collected from different platforms in one place for better management.
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Suvashree Bhattacharya is a researcher, blogger, and author in the domain of customer experience, omnichannel communication, and conversational AI. Serving as a content marketing strategist at REVE Chat, she develops contextual and interesting content for customers from different industries and segments like customer service, customer satisfaction, engagement, messaging platforms, etc. Passionate about writing and designing, she pours her heart out in writeups that are detailed, interesting, engaging, and more importantly cater to the requirements of the targeted audience. Her interests include reading, painting, and traveling.
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