Understanding your customers, their behavior, needs, expectations, and frustrations can create real value for your organization. In this article, we will discuss how you can use modern technology to analyze massive volumes of customer data collected from different sources, and use it to grow your business and achieve your goals.
What is Customer 360?
Over a period of time, customers interact with a product or a company multiple times, across various channels, and for different purposes. These interactions may range anything from visiting the company’s website, buying the product online, calling up the customer helpline service on the phone, visiting a physical store, sending a grievance email, to discussing the product on social media. These events, when viewed in isolation, fail to communicate the experiences and problems of the customers. However, when they are connected to form a story, they reveal the true picture and the insights become valuable.
The process of tracking and analyzing all customer interactions over time, across multiple touchpoints, to create a unified, 360-degree view of the customer is called Customer 360.
Big Data and Customer 360
Today, a customer can interact with a product at multiple touchpoints and some amount of data is generated in each interaction. When this data is collected for a large number of users, it not only becomes massive in volume, but also comes in disparate data formats. For example, the data generated on social media is very different from the data generated in the call center. Therefore, organizations utilize the power of Big Data to collect and understand this information. Once the data is available, they build a BI on Big Data solution to correlate this data and get insights about the customer behavior and their experience with the product or the service.
An Example: Customer 360 at a Leading Software Company
Many successful businesses today use Customer 360 to get instant Insights into billions of customer interactions. A leading multinational computer software company uses Customer 360 to increase their sales and deliver superior customer experiences. With millions of customers across the globe, they collect massive amounts of data from various customer touchpoints and then monitor them closely to get insights into their customer’s behavior.
Their Customer 360 solution helps them get answers to important business questions such as, which marketing activities lead to more product downloads, which product features improve the users’ experience, how do support calls in the call center affect customer retention, why a subscription got cancelled, and so on. This helps them evaluate their business strategies and take steps to improve their services.
How can it help you?
Customer 360 can help you get visibility into your customer’s experience and use the insights to improve your customer’s experience by offering better services. You can also detect problems and take corrective actions. For example, if you notice that customers who cancelled their subscription were not attended properly by the customer service department, you know you need to improve your support services to retain your customers. In fact, you can go into the details of the call to identify the real cause behind the issue.
Besides this, the insights can also be used to increase revenue by identifying opportunities for acquisition of new customers. For example, if you identify a prospective customer who visited your store as well as clicked on your social media ad, you can convert him instantly by offering a quick promotion deal.
These are just examples. Customer 360 offers unlimited potential that can help you build long-term relationships with your customers and maintain competitive edge. Depending upon your business, you can use the insights in innovative ways to achieve your goals.
Next Steps
To create real business impact, you must start with defining the key goals you want to achieve with your Customer 360 solution. Once the goals are clear, you must identify the right data sources and create a consolidated view or data lake that stores all the data in one place. The next and the most important step is to build a Big Data analytics platform on the data lake that enables users across your organization to get insights from this data.
Customer 360 helps you understand the business impact of thousands of customer journeys that take place every day and use the knowledge to fuel the growth of your organization.
AUTHOR BIO:
Namita Awasthi is a business and content strategist who writes about technologies and innovations that business decision makers need to know about. She has over 15 years of experience in writing and works for Kyvos Insights, a leading BI on Big Data solution provider.