The often cited but rarely realized 360-degree customer view refers to a holistic record of your customer’s profile that captures several types of customer-related data across several channels and thereafter aggregate that data in the CRM database to find out what is important to the customers.

Therefore, a 360-degree view of your customers helps to apply those customer insights collected in the CRM to set up engaging and personalized customer experience, which in turn help achieve company performance objectives.

Does it sound easy? Well, it is not.

According to a report published by Gartner, even lesser than 10% of business organizations have a 360-degree customer view, while only about 5% of these companies make use of this view to systematically improve their business.

Here is what this 5 % of companies that uses 360-degree customer view knows:

A 360-degree customer view using easy to use CRM software most essentially does three things.

1. Drive Customer Intelligence

Primarily, a 360-degree view of your customers drives customer intelligence, by displaying deep customer insights that show businesses how they can delight their customers, retain and up-sell to their customers and deliver personalized, relevant, contextual and predictive customer experience.

2. Enable Predictive Analysis

Secondly, 360-degree customer view in CRM software enables predictive analysis. That means, using a 360-degree view of your customers you can easily capture the interaction history of the customers and thereby calculate an outcome for each event.

For example, these outcomes can be rejection or acceptance of a sales proposal, or an offer made by the marketing team, or customer dissatisfaction or satisfaction related to a support call or a product sale, and others.

Now based on the sum of these outcomes for the customer, or a segment of your customers, the easy to use CRM system can recommend the greatest possible actions for sales, marketing or support scenarios.

A sample of such recommendations may include a Next Best Offer (NBO) for your marketing campaigns or Next Best Action (NBA) for customers while upgrading their account plans.

Every customer interactions recorded by a CRM that offers 360-degree customer interaction should most essentially contribute to your business performance goals- such as an increase in customer loyalty, retention, or customer share in your marketplace.

It must be noted over here that since customers are not homogenous, therefore your businesses’ actions or interactions with your customers must be measured, designed, and reported by customer segments or types in order to attain high confidence patterns that can be scaled and modeled for predictive results.

For example, measuring the outcomes of marketing offers, advertisements, cross-sell offers, sales proposals, customer service responses or loyalty program promotions for each customer segments in the CRM database helps businesses to adjust and direct their messages with enhanced specificity for fetching in improved and predictable outcomes.

Likewise, when an easy to use CRM software notices a preliminary pattern, such as a growing trend that is showing a certain type of customers generating a positive response to a cross-sell or up-sell offer, the 360-degree CRM can quickly scale that offer to all customer of the like type in its CRM database.

Or at a customer-specific level, the easy to use CRM system can also identify the ‘Next Best Offer’ based on the previous offer acceptance rates of similar customer types associated with your brand. Since with each customer’s rejection or acceptance of every offer the CRM software is adjusting and updating the NBO algorithm in the CRM system, which in turn by nurturing the ability to learn and predict customer responses to company actions increases customer share, acquisition of new customers and customer retention for your company.

Prescribe Customer Alignment

Thirdly, a 360-degree customer view helps in prescribing customer alignments. That means, a 360-degree view maps each customer in the CRM database into customer segment(s) to align business processes, and allocate resources based on the customer’s contribution or other business drivers for your brand.

For example, while a company may provide self-service support for low contributing customers, it can deliver ‘high-touch’ customer support for high contributing consumers of its brand.

This function of 360-degree view whereby it can define business processes by customer segment and types is extremely vital and effective in generating better margins from high contributing customers of your offerings and lower the costs to serve low margin customers.

Apart from these, a 360-degree customer view offers numerous other benefits, such as business process orchestration and cross-departmental information sharing within the company.

For example, using a 360-degree view CRM software, sales may defer the promotion of a new offering to a customer who is waiting for resolving a critical customer service issue.
Likewise, the customer service may also refer to a customer incurring challenge in sales when an additional product or service would easily resolve that dispute.

However, when you design cross-departmental customer interactions using a 360-degree view CRM software, it is critical to remember that customers expect a seamless and unified experience irrespective of the departments they are engaged with your business.

Conclusion

It is no longer a secret that most businesses provide their limited resources and time across all customers irrespective of the customer’s contribution to their business.

Therefore, in a gist, a 360-degree view of the customer helps in appending customer profiles in the CRM with data of their financial transactions in order to relocate investments and efforts to the customers based on their contribution to the company.

In other words, using a CRM with a 360-degree view helps to aggregate the information in the CRM database to measure performances such as customer profitability and RFM (Recent Frequency Monetary) analysis, for calculating long term customer metrics like CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of the customers with the company.