Knowing and understanding your customer has become a much larger need not just for the companies but for the customers too. Customers like to be reached out for content that adds value to their day to day life. A 360-degree customer view is aimed at giving companies a holistic understanding of customer behavior which is useful in approaching them for better deals.

With a myriad of channels and platforms from where you can extract customer data, it is becoming increasingly challenging for the companies to make sense of all that. This has its side-effects leading to disjointed and inconsistent customer experience.

Customers see all the employees of a company as one single brand. They want to be treated consistently all along their customer journey. With so many touchpoints and personnel dealing with customers at different times, it becomes challenging to gather all that data for better use. So, what’s the solution towards that and how can you leverage them towards business growth. We will see all that in detail in this blog. But let’s start with the definition of this concept.

What is a 360-degree customer view?

It is a comprehensive view of customer data. This view is obtained by aggregating data from various touchpoints a customer has made with the brand. This comprehensive data is the backbone of any process to understand a customer.

In a world full of competitors, it is not enough to just sell your product and keep away from the customers. You need customer-centricity as a priority in your SaaS firm. Understanding the customer without least bothering them is a virtue every SaaS firm wants. This helps them in maintaining a positive relationship with the customer along with giving them the best-in-class experience.

The field of data science has grown immensely in the past few years. Every single interaction a customer makes with an organization leaves a chunk of data that can be leveraged further. Capturing this data and transforming them into meaningful insights can lead to greater discoveries about the customer. This empowers companies to position themselves better and, most importantly, to identify in advance the evolving needs of the customer.

Benefits of having a 360-degree customer view

The benefits are huge ranging from helping out different departments creating new strategies to understanding customers well to give them greater customer experience. Let’s look at them individually.

Strategic marketing and sales campaigns

By collating the data of the customer champions, you can glean some useful insights. These insights can be leveraged further to upscale your sales. For example, the attributes of these customers would be the required set of qualities you would want in your ideal customers.

Hence, sales and marketing campaigns could be built around their demographics and behavior to attract more such customers. A quick example of that could be targeting only the finance professionals from the bay area for a particular product that meets their need.

Knowing your customer

This is the most obvious benefit of having a comprehensive view. Much like any relationship, customer relationships must also be understood from various facets. The quantitative data must be used towards measuring bigger metrics that are applicable at an organizational level. The qualitative data must be used by the client-facing staff and managers to better operationalize their responsibilities. But a 360 customer view allows each of these stakeholders to get a holistic understanding of a customer.

Personalized customer experience

Any intelligent customer success platform would not only give you useful insights but also provide you the actionable steps to leverage them. Hence, by gaining a 360-degree view, you can enhance your efforts towards customer experience. For example, if a customer has left some information with the service team and if a CSM can use that information while interacting with the customer, there’s nothing like it. The customer would love it for it reduces their efforts in sharing the same information again.

How to leverage a 360-degree customer view for Customer Success?

Customer success is the one of the most data-driven processes in a business. If yours is not, then make sure it becomes one. By having access to the customer data, you can orchestrate your efforts towards churn prevention, product adoption, account expansion, and even brand advocacy. Let’s look at them in detail.

Product adoption to prevent churn

In a typical 360-degree customer view data model, you would assess the following data:

• Purchase date
• Subscription renewal data
• Total revenue generated
• Renewal revenue
• Net Promoter Score
• Product/feature usage

This data allows you to take necessary action towards product adoption and thereby, to prevent churn. For example, through purchase date you would know how old the customer is. Based on that, you could set up a touchpoint through a virtual call, email recommendation or even a quarterly business review. Your most apt customer engagement model can take shape accordingly to drive product adoption or prevent churn.

Enhanced customer intelligence for account expansion

In a series of touchpoints that happen over a long period of time, it is often easy to get “recency biased”. It is natural to not remember all the interactions over a course of time but only the last one. But, any strategy towards major events like account expansion (upsells/cross-sells), would need all the considerations to be made.

Hence, a comprehensive customer intelligence provides you that edge to take all the points into account before taking any major call. You have to be very careful about the timing to approach customers for upsells. A simple miss could hamper your relationship with a customer. Hence, an informed decision through insightful customer intelligence is must.

Brand Advocacy

We already know that the only metric that shows the likelihood of your brand advocacy is Net Promoter Score (NPS). This metric is something which is not collected every now and then. Once the customer has given their response, it takes another six to twelve months to change their opinion.

To raise their rating, it needs a series of collective efforts. Sometimes even months long strategies to change their perception. To create strategies for such deep goals, you need a platform that can provide you a list of comprehensive data. This data can be used to study customer behavior deeply.

For example, what were the issues that led them towards the last rating? Have those issues been fixed now? Do customers have any new issues in this assessment period? And things like that. Only by gaining complete control over your customer data, you can drive brand advocacy.

Final Thoughts

If you are thinking of using 360-degree view customer data for your business then know that you are much ahead of the rest. There are only 10% of companies who use this feature and only 5% are able to use it to drive business growth.

The use of AI and machine learning have made it even more possible to derive meaningful insights from the distributed data. Any comprehensive customer success tool must have this feature to give a fair advantage to its users.

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