Marketing – The Importance Of A 360 Degree
View of Your Clients
The Importance Of A 360 Degree View of Your Clients
Introduction:
Any tool that can help you understand your clients, keep them engaged, and when you last spoke to them and all of the products and services that you have sold them is essential. A 360-degree view of your clients will build lasting relationships and remind you if you may have forgotten to speak with them recently. We have compiled this list of articles to support this argument and give you a better understanding of its importance.
A Bigger View Of Your Clients:
[1]A 360-degree customer view will not only help you see what your customers have done, but it will also help you figure out where they might be going next. By ensuring that you log all your customer data into one place, you can then use it to drive better forecasts and make more reliable predictive analytics.
What is a 360-degree view?
A 360-degree view of a customer is a collection of all your customer data in one place, from the basic contact information on customers to all their past and present purchasing data and all interactions with customer service, as well as their social media behavior.
360 degrees is a relationship cycle that consists of many touchpoints where a customer meets the brand. Be it through purchases or marketing communications, via customer service, or on social media.
Today, having a great product isn’t enough. You need great customer service to match. That’s why being able to access all the customer service-related interactions, such as requests, complaints, inquiries, etc., is paramount in getting a fully comprehensive view of a customer.
Your customers’ behavior on social media is an indicator of their day-to-day interactions with and reactions to your brand. Pay attention to social media channels to find out whether your customers talk about you online. Do they follow your branded profiles? Are they actively engaging with your posts? Do they leave comments or ask questions?
If you, as a company, are present and collect information on each stop in this 360-degrees relationship cycle, then you truly know your customers. It helps you better understand your customers’ priorities and preferences. This, in turn, means you can position yourself to predict their current and future needs better.
[2]Think of the 360-view as a crystal ball. When you look inside, you can see the past, present, and future of a customer’s relationship with your brand.
The past
How have consumers interact with your products or services before? A 360-degree view of your customer means that you can see their history and find meaningful and easily digested facts about the consumer. This includes elements such as:
- Product/service activity
- Interaction history across all channels
- Recent product views
- Campaign activity
- Process history
The present
When a customer reaches out, regardless of the channel used, a company needs to know what’s going on with their account and their stage of the buying cycle. Being up to speed on present behaviors of customers means organizations need to track customer information:
- Who are they?
- How do they relate to the organization?
- What is the context of the interaction?
- Is there a recent order or current issue recorded that a customer service agent should be aware of?
The future
By understanding a customer’s past and present behaviors, businesses can take findings and map a future relationship. Using digital intelligence, it is possible to tell if there are upsell or cross-sell opportunities, e.g., Are your customers intrigued by cookies or retargeting? What ads/content are they most interested in?
By analyzing what customers have previously looked at, marketers and sellers can predict future buying behaviors and create a plan that addresses pain points and queries.
[3]What does a 360-degree customer view consist of?
There are five main types of customer data: demographic, transactional, environmental, behavioral, and social. This data is siloed across multiple businesses at many businesses that don’t intersect—web behavior in one, customer service data in another, sales figures in a third, etc. Here are three benefits of syncing up your data and building a 360-degree customer view.
Recency bias and a lack of accurate customer information can doom your marketing strategy. Marketers get tunnel vision based on a single data point, while sales reps base their opinions on their most recent call with a customer. Lack of cohesion between channels can obscure customer trends and camouflage actionable insights.
By integrating your customer data across channels and aligning your departments, you’ll ensure every person at your company is drinking from the same fountain of customer information. You’ll have a much clearer picture of your customers’ activities and priorities. This includes purchase history, social media interactions, service requests, and email communication.
Customer Predictions
With a clearer view of your customers’ past, you’ll be better equipped to pick out behavior patterns and anticipate their future. In addition to human insight, some marketers are beginning to harness the power of AI and machine learning to drive predictive analytics.
These insights enable you to develop effective marketing strategies. If you’re trying to forecast how a new product line might go over, you can use your 360-degree view of customer data to form an educated guess. It allows your team to anticipate and act on opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, and more on the sales side.
Customer Service and Retention
A customer relationship is about much more than a sale—it’s about a journey that ebbs and flows over time. With a 360-degree view, you can spot things in the data that could lead to customer pain points down the road. When your customers run into problems, your response makes all the difference. Please don’t make them do any extra work. Give your service agents the tools they need to assess the situation and troubleshoot issues quickly.
On the customer retention side, dispatching relevant messages at the right time is the key to building ongoing customer relationships. Anticipating customer needs and developing a strategic communication plan keeps your business top of mind and turns a one-time purchase into a continuous string of sales.
Meeting customer expectations in the digital age
Customers expect you to deliver the right answer the first time—on whichever channel they prefer. It doesn’t take much for them to do their research online, quickly comparison shop to find a brand that feels more in tune with their needs, and switch to one of your competitors. Building a 360-degree view of your customers can help you fill in the gaps and deliver seamless omnichannel experiences time after time.
[4]Here are three benefits that a 360-degree customer view provides:
- Create more strategic sales and marketing campaigns. One of the main benefits that a 360-degree customer view provides is extending the business’s sales and marketing teams. These teams can build more strategic sales and marketing campaigns by using existing data. For example, if a retailer sees that a customer frequently purchases sneakers and athletic equipment, the sales and marketing teams can create marketing and advertising campaigns that target this interest.
- Understand customers and their behaviors. Another benefit of a 360-degree customer view is understanding customers, tastes and behaviors better. For example, healthcare providers can understand a patient’s holistic medical history and their habits and behaviors with an aggregate customer view. Does the patient schedule regular annual exams? What is the patient’s medical history, and what preventative measures, if any, can the health provider take?
- Deliver more personalized shopping experiences. Perhaps one of the most important benefits of a 360-degree view of the customer is that it can deliver more personalized shopping experiences. Businesses can use aggregated, invaluable data to provide customers with more personalized experiences across their lifetime shopping journey. For example, if a bank is aware that a customer now has new dependents who will attend college in a few years, the bank can send personalized, saving account offerings to the customer. And, similarly, the bank can provide more personalized retirement plans down the line for the customer.
Conclusion:
If you have any questions on any part of this article or need to install a CRM system that can assist you with client management, please give hughesagency.ca a call today.
RapidPage has compiled this article, and all of the reference links are listed below.
- https://www.superoffice.com/blog/360-degree-overview/#:~:text=A%20360%2Ddegree%20customer%20view%20will%20not%20only%20help%20you,make%20more%20reliable%20predictive%20analytics. ↑
- https://digitalmarketinginstitute.com/blog/the-what-why-and-how-of-360-degree-customer-view ↑
- https://www.horizontaldigital.com/insights/360-view-of-the-customer ↑
- https://www.mulesoft.com/resources/api/benefits-360-degree-customer-view ↑
