360 Degree Customer View

What is a 360° View of the Customer, and why is it important?  First we’ll talk about the benefits of painting a complete picture of your customer, and then we’ll talk about how to go about making this happen.

The benefits of a customer centric approach can be organized along the lines of customer acquisition and expansion, customer retention, and operational efficiency. 

Customer acquisition and expansion are generally the domain of marketing and sales working in tandem.  The benefits to marketing revolve primarily around the ability to segment customers into groups to allow them to tailor their messages.  Using information such as current products and services, past purchase history, financial and other attributes, marketing can target the most profitable customers and even exclude customers that are likely to be unprofitable.  Sales is generally more interested in having all the information for a single customer at their finger tips.  This helps them plan out their sales calls, pull together proposals and bids, and respond to customer inquiries.

Customer retention should be a joint effort between customer service, marketing, and sales.  But it often falls into the lap of customer service, who like sales is usually most interested in having all information for a particular customer.  They primarily use this in a reactive mode, while fielding calls from customers wanting to change service or resolve a problem.  However, one of the primary benefits to a complete customer view is the ability to be proactive by linking events to a particular customer, and even tailoring the level of response based on the status level of the customer (e.g., Gold level customers get priority).

Operational efficiency is usually the purview of the finance group, although all functional areas are impacted, particularly when budget cutting time rolls around.  Finance is most interested in profitability and other monetary metrics around the customer, usually at a segment level or across the entire customer base.  This information can be used to drive business expansion plans, advise marketing and sales on high value customer segments, and provide management insights into the overall health of the business via trending.

The technical solution revolves around the key data elements that make up your customer profile, such as contact information, transaction, financial, and interaction data.  There are a number of tools (e.g., Siperian Hub) available today that are marketed under the category of “Customer Data Integration”.  These tools provide a common data model, data cleansing, integration, change management and other related capabilities.  You can also use more general purpose tools such as Enterprise Information Integration (EII) or Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) tools to integrate the data, either virtually or explicitly.  But be careful of the vendor promise to deliver this on a platter.  The critical effort will be determining the high-value benefits and engaging the business in crafting the solution.

For a more detailed discussion on this subject, download my white paper 360 Degree Customer View. 

This entry was posted on 17. April 2008 at 15:23 and is filed under Business Focus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.