Greatest hits of Customer 360: Definition, benefits, examples
We're getting closer to the CX holy grail. Learn about Customer 360, the benefits of a unified comprehensive profile for brands, and the role of CDP in achieving it.
How are businesses working to reach new levels of sales growth, brand recognition, and customer loyalty? According to new research, they’re focused on boosting customer experience with a new data strategy.
The findings show that companies across regions and industries realize that great CX isn’t built on siloed front-end engagement solutions. Instead, they’re pursuing a more comprehensive, customer-centric approach fueled by data and systems from across the enterprise.
Let’s take a closer look at what this new customer data strategy involves, its challenges, and why businesses think it can lead to a big payoff.
The customer data dilemma
Understanding customer expectations, needs, and preferences is critical for business growth. With this insight, organizations can deliver experiences that generate new revenue opportunities, reduce churn, and inspire loyalty.
Customer data management makes it possible for enterprises to gain a true understanding of their customers in today’s digital-first economy. Yet in an environment of rapidly evolving privacy legislation, browser technology, and martech innovation, putting the customer data puzzle pieces together across channels is harder than ever.
A Pulse Survey conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, in association with SAP, shows companies aren’t able to use customer data today in the ways they know are vital.
A paradigm shift is happening in the industry, Sameer Patel, Chief Marketing and Solutions Officer for SAP Customer Experience told CRM Buyer.
“Over the next 18 months, 60% of the companies will boost spending in the area of data knowledge and insight. So they are getting it that this is really important,” he said.
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A data strategy (re)definition
What are c-suites looking to accomplish with this increased investment? They want to take the practice of customer data management to a whole new level.
Gone are the days when CIOs and their IT teams could focus mainly on the collection and storage of data. Now, they’re building strategies for turning data into real-time insight that improves customer engagement.
As a first step, they’re widening the scope of customer profiles. Front-office engagement data can only go so far. To deepen their customer understanding, forward-looking companies are building processes so enterprise-level data from financial ledger systems and the supply chain round out their customer profiles.
Next, they’re ensuring this rich data can be used in real time by the teams that impact engagement the most.
“You can’t rely on stale or outdated data to personalize your customer experience,” said Scott Ramsey, CX digital transformation leader at Capgemini.
“Therefore, you have to have a customer data strategy and infrastructure that’s flexible, agile, and scalable, which allows you to move at the speed of the customer.”
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Striving for a centralized data model
To make this shift happen, companies are prioritizing the creation of a centralized data model.
According to the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services research, 79% of respondents said they’re in the process of implementing a centralized data model, have already done so, or are planning to implement one.
With this data model in place, businesses can boost CX from the first digital engagement to the most recent service call. In addition to bolstering satisfaction and building loyalty, these more relevant, personalized engagements open the door to more cross-sell and upsell opportunities.
In the Pulse Survey report, Liz Miller, VP and principal analyst for Constellation Research, emphasized the importance of this end-to-end coverage.
“We’ve started to see really smart organizations shift to a strategy in which customer experience is an enterprise-wide team sport,” she said, “where the three ‘horsewomen of the apocalypse’— sales, service, and marketing—are all riding together.”
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The ultimate team player: Customer data platforms
Customer data platforms are emerging as a vital tool to pair with a centralized data model. Once viewed purely as a marketing solution, CDPs are now serving as a foundation for companies’ entire CX strategy.
They enable data management capabilities of back-end systems such as ERP, supply chain, and inventory management to be structurally intertwined with the systems that deliver engagement. This makes a CDP a prime facilitator of the “team sport” strategy proposed by Miller. With this unified model of financial, supply chain, manufacturing, and customer data within the enterprise, a CDP can support both operational planning and experience delivery.
Moreover, today’s CDPs can integrate with customer identity solutions to build profiles based on first-party, permission-based data and establish governance that honors the purpose of the data collected.
This capability can help businesses build true 360-degree views of customers, even with the deprecation of third-party cookie data and the constant evolution of data privacy laws around the globe.
The last – and most important – point: CDPs can enhance an organization’s ability to activate data and insights to the systems that move the CX needle. Low code/no code connectors make customer data an enterprise service, not a siloed departmental resource. Built-in artificial intelligence can improve everything from audience segmentation to service recommendations.
These features make relevant, real-time customer data more actionable for the teams responsible for delivering CX, helping them do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.
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Coordination is the name of the game
CDPs are not silver bullets by themselves. Instead, they should be viewed as a big piece of the data strategy shift companies are making to enhance the CX they offer.
This shift involves liberating and democratizing data so that marketing, commerce, sales, and service functions can work in the same manner that customers see the company—as one organization, not distinct units.
As a result, it will help achieve the end goal of creating better processes, better personalization, and better business outcomes, because everyone is on the same page with a single version of the truth.