The Secrets Behind Personalization: The Customer 360 view

What is the Customer 360?

The Customer 360 is a single view of your customer across the entire customer journey. 

It encompasses every touchpoint and customer engagement along that way. From the first conversations to purchases, support tickets, and even to the last bitter goodbyes.

Specifically, Customer 360 builds a holistic view integrating all customer data from the various data sources at your company:

• CRM or Customer Relationship Manager - every communication touchpoint
• Transaction database - every purchase, return, and wishlist
• ERP or Enterprise relationship manager - every order and logistics touch
• Apps and APIs - collect and track all product usage, especially if your product is a SaaS app or your customers interact with you via digitalized channels
• Social media - all public communications, likes, comments, and customer engagements  
• … and any other source of data capturing the interaction between your professional services and the customer. 

How is Customer 360 Used? 

The Customer 360 is a toolkit most commonly used by client-facing roles. 

For example, when your Customer Success Manager needs to renegotiate a deal or upsell an existing client, they quickly fire up the Customer 360 to get a holistic and real-time view of everything that mattered and happened with that client.

Or when your technical support hero receives a return ticket for an e-Commerce order gone wrong, they can quickly establish all the past communication with the client, how often they purchase, their general satisfaction with your company (NPS survey anyone?) and make fast choices about how to resolve a complaint.

In other words, Customer 360 empowers your front-line warriors to offer the most personalized and elevated customer experience there is. At every touchpoint. 

Beyond the Typical Customer 360 Use Cases

The data sets used to build the Customer 360 view allow you to go beyond improving the customer experience for every individual. 

Building the Customer 360 view can allow you to innovate in ways that get you ahead of your competition. 

The obvious example is customer profiles used by marketing and sales. Traditional segmentation techniques involve using demographics to cluster your customers into segments. “Male or female between 20 and 65 years” is the infamous target persona. 

With all the data available to you, you can build refined segments. Segments that are based on customer satisfaction or purchase frequency. Segments that are much more tailored to your actual customers than to your envisioned profiles. 

With the advent of big data and the use of artificial intelligence, companies have started using Customer 360 for even more innovative initiatives. 

Machine learning algorithms take the data from individual Customer 360 views and build predictive algorithms that help you optimize pricing (“What customer profile is more likely to be upsold?”) or even improve retention (identify the risk factors of churning and prevent them altogether).

These are just some of the many advantages the Customer 360 view offers.

What are the Benefits of Customer 360?

There are 3 main advantages to the Customer 360 model:

1. Streamline operations. Improve the efficiency and functionality of your client-facing teams by empowering them with the toolkit necessary to quickly address all of your customers’ needs in real-time. 
2. Break down silos. Avoid internal communication ping-pongs and inefficient workflows. Sales calling IT to understand how often a customer logged into your app last month. Marketing asking support what are the most common concerns in our tickets so they can preemptively address them in their newsletter. By having a common - and shared - view of every customer, your different departments can communicate between themselves more effectively. 
3. Accelerate digital transformation. Digital transformation heralds the era when companies rely on software to do the heavy lifting, so their creative workers can spend more time innovating. Building the Customer 360 moves you leaps closer to the digital transformation line in the sand. To build the Customer 360 view, you have to do a bit of data management standardization, and build a data warehouse that acts as a single source of truth for all your customer data integrations. The simple act of unifying and standardizing your data already transforms you into a digitally more efficient operation. 

So how do you build a Customer 360 model to unlock these benefits?

Streamline your Customer 360 with Automation 

Building a data warehouse as a single source of truth that unifies and integrates all the different data sources seems to be a challenging engineering problem.

But it does not have to be painful.

With Keboola, you can easily build your Customer 360 with a single data platform:

1. ​​Easily ingest multiple data sources with a couple of clicks. Keboola automates data collection and loading from over 250 sources and destinations, without additional engineering or maintenance needed. From CRMs to ERPs and every other app in between, customer data from all your data sources can be automatically collected using devoted Keboola components. 
2. Transform, clean, and aggregate your data with automated jobs, written in the preferred language of data engineers and scientists - iterate faster, by tapping into tried and tested SQL, R, Python, or other programs that help you wrangle your data into shape in the language of choice of your users.
3. Send your cleaned data to the data warehouse of your choice. Or even a business intelligence tool to present your Customer 360 data with striking visualizations. 

Try it for free. Keboola has an always-free, no-credit-card-required plan. So, you can build your Customer 360 model with a couple of clicks. Feel free to give it a go or reach out to us if you have any questions.