Customer 360: What it is & why it matters

What Is Customer 360?

Simply put, customer 360 is a method of unifying customer data in a way that allows businesses to personalize interactions, improve the customer experience, and increase metrics such as retention and lifetime value.

In most cases, customer data is segmented across multiple platforms, databases, and touchpoints. By building a hub for this data, it allows businesses to make more informed decisions and provide better value to their customers than their competitors.

Businesses can also use this data to predict where a customer is in their journey throughout the product. By gaining live insights into customer behavior, companies can proactively reach out to solve pain points, or provide additional value through add-on services at exactly the right time.

Why do you need customer 360?

Your company needs Customer 360 to create a complete view of who your customer is by combining all their from data across your organization. This data will better help your company attend to customers’ wants and needs.

What Problems Does Customer 360 Solve?

Customer 360 gives businesses the most recent client data that can be viewed in a single system. This allows customer success managers (CSMs) to provide the best experience and add the most amount of value to a client based on their recorded experiences. CSMs can use this data to create highly personalized solutions for the customer which in turn helps boost customer retention.

A Customer 360 view also aids the customer service team to access accurate information without re-prompting the customer. By having a centralized repository of customer data you can reduce friction between your product and the customer while also understanding their overall needs and goals more accurately.

Overall, there are many business benefits with collecting all customer data in one place and creating a one-stop shop for all your customer insights. In the end you want to align on business goals together with your customers, drive customer loyalty, enable predictive analytics and reduce costs by being able to foresee which customers need what type of attention - and when.

To get to that end goal, you should gather as much data as possible about your customer. Emails, chats, notes, usage trends, subscription dates, health scores, user data, billing dates, revenue - everything is important information.

Also, and equally important, you want to spread the collected Customer 360 information across all departments of your business, and not create siloes where different departments have a different view of the very same customer.

This is most easily done by using a customer platform that doesn´t limit access via limited users but rather the opposite - unlimited usage for everybody in your company.

Keep in mind that one important part of a Customer 360 Profile is channel visibility: the access to different data collected from various channels connecting your customer to your business.

When collecting all your data to create the channel visibility you need, make sure that the data is cleansed, organized and presented in a correct way that makes it understandable and actionable to everyone.

What Makes Up a Customer 360 Profile?

Customer 360 profiles will vary from business to business, but generally, record some of the same key data points. The more data points you collect on your customers, the more accurate your insights can be.

These profiles can contain:

• Complaints, survey results, notes from prior interactions

• Technical support issues and other challenges

• Number of transactions, products purchases, and features accessed

• Brand engagement (email opens, website visits, mobile app use)

• Personal information (name, email, phone number, physical address, ect)

• Psychographics (behavior, lifestyle, values, ect)

• Demographics (race, location, employment status)

How To Implement Customer 360 In Your Business

Building a customer 360 view is an ongoing process with numerous challenges along the way. Despite these hurdles, the benefits of designing a centralized customer profile are well worth it. One of the main challenges in designing this type of system is overcoming data siloing.

Customer data is everywhere and often segregated across different platforms and databases. Social media engagement happens across different sites, customer information is stored internally, and helpdesk tickets have their own database. Consolidation makes this information accessible, allowing businesses to act on highly relevant and timely information.

In the past, this would require hiring data specialists and programmers to build a centralized platform, and then build a complicated web of connections to every place your customer metrics exist. This not only required a large upfront investment, but also made customer 360 dashboards accessible only to enterprise organizations.

Thanks to advancements in machine learning and data analytics, platforms like Planhat can centralize client information in an intuitive and customizable interface that makes it easy to understand where customers are in their product journey. This streamlined approach allows businesses both big and small to harness the power of a customer-centric strategy.

How Planhat can help

Planhat connects all the customer data, gets actionable insights, and drives actions to manage renewals, reduce churn and boost expansion.

Planhat also provides a unified view of your customers all in one place, identifies risks and opportunities, creates clear, repeatable processes through the customer lifecycle, and offers multi-channel communication as well as customized inboxes for teams.

With Planhat Portals, it is possible to share success plans, playbooks, dashboards, goals, documents, and align business goals with your clients in a branded Customer Portal.

Altogether, Planhat is a complete Customers Success platform that lets you track the KPIs that matter the most for the future growth of your business.

You can read more about Customer Success analytics and how to use it to track your KPIs here, Download our report to learn What's next for Customer Success? or get a Planhat demo!