Customer 360 is a concept that refers to getting a single view of customer engagement across the entire customer journey. It connects apps and data sources from customer interactions to give businesses a 360-degree customer view. It includes customer data from: customer demographics, customer relationship management (CRM), social media, eCommerce, marketing, sales, customer service, mobile apps, and any other customer touchpoints.
Businesses use Customer 360 to gain real-time customer information to optimize personalized customer experiences (CX) and workflows. By having a single source of truth, organizations can make better decisions about CX to improve customer loyalty and revenue.
What is Customer 360?
Customer 360 is a concept that refers to getting a single, comprehensive view of customer engagement across the entire customer journey. By connecting apps and data sources from customer interactions, businesses can gain a 360-degree view of their customers, including customer demographics, CRM data, social media interactions, eCommerce data, and more. This complete view of customer data allows businesses to optimize personalized customer experiences (CX) and workflows in real-time.
Benefits of having a Customer 360
Having a Customer 360 provides numerous benefits to organizations. Some of the key benefits include:
- Improved and exceptional CX across every touchpoint: By having a complete view of customer data, businesses can deliver tailored and personalized experiences to their customers across all touchpoints. This can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
- Reliable customer segments and profiles: With a comprehensive view of customer data, businesses can create reliable customer segments and profiles to improve their marketing and sales initiatives. This can help target the right customers with the right offers and messages, leading to higher conversion rates and revenue.
- Streamlined and connected business processes and workflows: A single source of truth for customer data can help businesses streamline and connect their business processes and workflows. This can reduce errors, improve efficiency, and increase productivity.
- Reduced time and cost caused by human error: By automating data management and reducing manual processes, businesses can reduce the time and cost caused by human error in the customer journey. This can save resources and improve customer experiences.
- Accelerated digital transformation and automation: With a single view of customer data, businesses can accelerate their digital transformation and automation efforts across the enterprise. This can help them stay competitive and adapt to changing customer needs and preferences.
An integration platform as a service (iPaaS) can help businesses achieve Customer 360 by facilitating the integration and reconciliation of customer data from various sources and systems. iPaaS solutions provide a central platform for data integration, allowing businesses to connect, manage, and automate the flow of customer data from various apps and platforms.
This can help businesses gain a single, comprehensive view of their customer data, allowing them to deliver personalized customer experiences and optimize their business processes and workflows. iPaaS solutions also often include features such as data mapping and transformation, data quality and governance, and API management, which can help ensure the accuracy and reliability of customer data.
In addition, many iPaaS solutions are scalable and flexible, allowing businesses to easily add or remove data sources and applications as their needs change. This can help businesses keep pace with changing customer needs and preferences and maintain a competitive edge.
Overall, an iPaaS can be a valuable tool for achieving Customer 360 by facilitating the integration and management of customer data from various sources.
Getting a 360 view of your customer
Customer data resides in silos across your CRM system, in on-premises and SaaS applications, in databases, and within every system of record. To gain a single customer view, all of your customer data needs to be reconciled and unified through data integration. Likewise, all of the apps and platforms the business uses (marketing, sales, purchasing, finance, ERP, logistics/shipping, customer service, customer success, etc.) must be integrated. This can be done through APIs and is often done through a data platform, like an integration platform as a service (iPaaS), such as SnapLogic. An iPaaS makes data integration and application integration easy, scalable, and accessible to both tech and non-tech users.
Businesses can purchase Customer 360 platforms (such as Salesforce Customer 360 or Microsoft Dynamics 365) from providers that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to streamline data management and ensure data quality. These platforms vary in pricing.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Customer 360 is a valuable concept that allows businesses to gain a comprehensive view of their customers and optimize CX and workflows in real-time. By reconciling and unifying customer data through data integration and utilizing a Customer 360 platform, businesses can drive improved customer loyalty and revenue.
