Develop a 360-Degree View of Your Customer with Real-Time Connected Data Warehouse

Customer churn is a big concern for the sales and marketing teams. It is far easier (and cheaper) to keep your current customers happy than it is to acquire new customers.  But how happy are your customers? Do you really know? Leveraging a connected data warehouse to develop a 360-degree view of your customers can help you identify how satisfied your customers are and what they want. It can also provide actionable insights into what makes them happy, what is frustrating them, and whether they are recommending your products and services to others.

Where Does the Data for a Customer 360-Degree View Come From?

It might be tempting to think that your customer relationship management (CRM) system already has a 360-degree view of your customer. However, your CRM only provides you with a narrow view of the information available to you. Data siloes exist in a wide variety of places that (if you have the right tools to help you aggregate and analyze them) can provide a perspective on your customers that can generate powerful insights.

• Internal Systems: Your CRM platform likely isn’t your only internal system that contains data about your customers. Marketing, sales, customer support, and logistics systems often capture data about various touch points between your company and the customer. Each interaction contains clues about the customer’s perception of your products, services, facilities, staff, and business processes.
• Customer Loyalty Programs and Mobile Apps: Does your company use mobile applications and a loyalty program to drive customer engagement?  The specific activities that customers perform on these platforms, as well as the frequency of use, time of day, and location, all provide insights into customer behavior, preferences, and buying patterns.
• Social Networks: Today, most customers leverage social networks to craft their perceptions of companies and their products as well as share their feedback with others. Data from social networks can help you understand patterns of social influence. They provide a source of rich demographic information that can be used for targeted marketing.  Most importantly, social postings can give you a genuine insight into how the customer feels about your company – even if they wouldn’t give you the feedback directly.

How Can a Customer 360-Degree View Help You Reduce Churn?

The concept behind developing a 360-degree view of your customer is that by assembling all of the available data, you can develop a more complete and accurate perspective of customer sentiment, behaviors, and patterns of influence and the data can also be used to predict future behavior and buying patterns. This means that you understand how they feel about your products and services; you can also determine how those feelings are likely to impact the likelihood to make future purchases.

If your customer view includes external perspectives from social networks, you may also be able to gain insights as to where and how the customer’s perception is developed (often, it isn’t just from direct interaction with your company). Armed with this information, you can determine the most effective and efficient means of influencing customer perception. This could be through targeted marketing and sales promotion, customer service (adding a personal touch), or influencing indirectly by leveraging the customer’s social relationships.

How Can a Real-Time Connected Data Warehouse Help?

The data that goes into creating a Customer 360-degree view comes from many different sources. To create the view, you first need to connect to those sources and then aggregate the individual data points into a unified data set. Then you can use this data set to perform analytics to harvest actionable insights. That may seem like many steps, but a real-time connected data warehouse can provide you with all the tools you need to be successful – a cloud data warehouse, an integration platform, and analytics tools-  all tightly integrated.

The integration platform enables you to connect to a bunch of different sources to ingest data quickly – either in batches or in real-time. These sources can be within your company or from 3^rd parties (like social networks). They can also be things like mobile apps, IoT devices, or cloud services in addition to systems with traditional databases. The cloud data warehouse itself provides a place to store and aggregate the data you collect in real-time. As you analyze the data, you may need to store multiple versions of the data set at different levels of refinement. The cloud data warehouse can support that.

Analytics tools and reporting systems can then be used to harvest the customer data for actionable insights that your staff can leverage to influence the customer’s perspective. The integration platform can help you to push these insights in real-time out to the systems used by your product managers, marketing teams, and customer service staff. Providing the information they need at their fingertips.

Actian is the industry leader in real-time connected data warehouse solutions. With the right connected data warehouse, developing a holistic view of your customers is much easier. The insights you gain can help you drive the business decisions that lead to delighted customers and reduce customer churn. To learn more, visit www.actian.com

About Actian Corporation

Actian is helping businesses build a bridge to a data-defined future. We’re doing this by delivering scalable cloud technologies while protecting customers’ investments in existing platforms. Our patented technology has enabled us to maintain a 10-20X performance edge against competitors large and small in the mission-critical data management market. The most data-intensive enterprises in financial services, retail, telecommunications, media, healthcare and manufacturing trust Actian to solve their toughest data challenges.