The Value of a 360-Degree Customer View

Embracing changes in customer demands is an essential quality of a forward-thinking enterprise. Customer demands are always evolving, and the past few years have turned consumer behavior on its head, making agility the biggest competitive differentiator. So how are companies supposed to keep up with customer preferences?

Determining what behavior will become long-term shifts depends heavily on consumers’ openness to embracing new experiences versus reverting to pre-pandemic behaviors. As more customers increasingly expect a real-time, personalized, data-driven experience, companies are realizing they must prioritize building and nurturing more purposeful relationships with customers in order to set themselves apart competitively. In fact, our recent report with 451 Research reveals that nearly 84% of respondents believe transforming to a real-time enterprise is important to meet customer demands. With a 360-degree view of the customer, business leaders can stay apprised of changing behaviors and ensure that the same truth is accessible to everyone in the company.

The Benefits of a Holistic 360-Degree Customer View

As consumer behavior changed alongside the pandemic, our report with 451 Research shows that 81% of businesses believe generating a 360-degree view of the customer to understand intent and context will have a high impact over the next two years.

Achieving a holistic view can provide numerous benefits in this data-driven customer experience economy, such as:

• Customer Loyalty: Most customers prefer to buy from a business that caters to them. Predicting their needs and tailoring the experience will help build customer loyalty and more trust over time.
• Improving ROI: Using data aggregated in the 360-degree view can help your business make more purposeful touchpoints with customers. Knowing their preferences and general behavior will also help improve marketing campaigns, thereby increasing the bottom line.
• Collaboration Across Departments: Sharing the same customer view across departments can help teams communicate with each other more effectively so that they can work collaboratively on the customer efforts that matter. From sales and marketing initiatives to nurturing campaigns – collaboration is key.

To reach these goals and enjoy their benefits, companies must aggregate data from a variety of touchpoints that consumers use to interact with the business and make purchases, cataloging and interpreting that data for insights. However, many businesses find it challenging to harvest data.

Barriers to Entry

There is an insurmountable amount of data that flows through touchpoints and events that companies collect and analyze across public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises infrastructure. Collecting, managing, and making sense of this data is critical to understanding the complete customer profile. However, our research reveals that roughly one-third of organizations (32%) say they have 7+ silos of customer data. If data is that siloed, it is challenging to aggregate and understand all of the data points needed to achieve a unified customer view.

For many IT departments, it is difficult to conceptualize the amount of data points that must be considered when aggregating the data needed for a modern, 360-degree view. As businesses innovate and improve their infrastructure and AI/ML applications, learning how to harness this data is more important than ever to truly capture the potential of these innovations.

Achieving a 360-Degree Customer View

Harnessing the power of data is necessary for any company that wants to personalize its customer experience using a 360-degree view. Businesses must consider all tools, processes, and data from start to finish. This helps maintain a storehouse of all knowledge of customer behaviors and preferences to tailor the experience for each customer. Additionally, businesses must capture, analyze, and actualize the information they collect, including recognizing patterns and solving problems at scale. Once achieved, a 360-degree view of the customer will help businesses anticipate customer needs, personalize experiences, and stay ahead of competitors.

The Actian Data Platform with its Customer 360 Real-time Analytics solution runs on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud platforms. Data can be migrated easily to the Avalanche platform, enabling users to stay connected to tools they use to analyze and visualize Customer 360 data.

For more information, please read about Actian’s Customer 360 real-time analytics solution, view the solution brochure or download the Actian Customer 360 eBook.

About Traci Curran

Traci Curran serves as Director of Product Marketing at Actian focused on the Actian Data Platform. With more than 20 years of experience in technology marketing, Traci has previously held senior marketing roles at CloudBolt Software, Racemi (acquired by DXC Corporation), as well as some of the world’s most innovative startups. Traci is passionate about helping customers understand how they can accelerate innovation and gain competitive advantage by leveraging digital transformation and cloud technologies.