Have you ever answered a phone call from a sales rep that couldn’t remember the details of your account?
You expect to be viewed and treated like a valued customer because you know the data is there, they just haven’t taken the time to study up before the call.
Today, customers expect united, data-driven communications.
A 360-degree customer view approach to managing relationships supports efforts at every stage of the sales funnel.
B2B professionals can analyze decision-making processes and build better communication with stakeholders.
What is a 360-degree customer view?
The single customer 360-degree view provides full visibility into a contact or account’s business relationships. These contact details include more than just names and numbers but also contextual details highlighting buying behavior.
Also known as a single customer view, the 360-degree view centralizes customer data to provide access across every department. Sales reps, execs, and marketers have a singular record for every contact and account.
Let’s say you have a customer who buys products in bulk from your company on a quarterly basis. In a CRM you can see your customer’s order history and communications logs, but that information alone gives you limited insights.
With a complete 360-degree view compiled from multiple platforms, you can better calculate future purchasing needs.
Benefits of 360-degree customer view
This view links together quantitative details through every stage of the customer journey into thorough profiles. These profiles help with predicting account targeting and factors for optimal lead conversion.
By building granular profiles with advanced analytics, marketers can reduce their time-to-market, and help sales reps with upselling plans.
Other benefits of utilizing a 360-degree customer view include:
#1: Improved customer experience
To stay on top of the B2B game (and even B2C), you have to stay relevant.
A single customer view helps by allowing personalization in your customer experiences. Knowing the finer details within accounts enables better segmentation and more tailored messaging. Ultimately, this makes it easier to cross-sell, upsell, retain customers and build loyalty.
If you can see your customer’s purchasing history, tech stacks, and product campaigns, your proposals and pitches will have a higher success rate over someone sending a mass one-size-fits-all pitch.
#2: Optimized resource use
Instead of 12 customer data management tools, how about just 1 or 2? With a single, solidified customer view, costs can be cut by creating fewer reports with fewer tools. It also eliminates the need to replicate data in different platforms.
CRM systems will always be a must, but countless dollars and minutes will be wasted if each department is using a different platform for managing customer data.
In 360-degree customer view-specific customer data platforms, such as Salesforce, a contact has a unique ID attached, which is accessed across different applications.
#3: Easier data quality management
The company with the most complete view of contacts and accounts wins in optimizing customer insight usage. And that view can’t be complete without quality data.
Combined with solid data management strategies, data quality provides the freedom to access accurate and up-to-date customer information. Quality management requires consistent cleanup of errors and duplicates, which is done more easily and efficiently in a singular view system.
Data sources used in 360-degree views
Data gets thrown and shoved everywhere in multiple places. In our day-to-day workflows, we don’t really think much about it. These places of data storage range from CRMs, social media channels, company websites, eCommerce platforms, and more from both legacy and new platforms.
Completing a 360-degree customer view requires the consolidation of all contact data from every digital tool used. You need to locate, combine, and scrub it clean to form a solitary data lake.
But where does that data originally come from? Finding the source of the source can help with gaining better contact and business data for the future.
Data source types
Understanding the different types of data sources helps weed through the considerable amount of data available in the market today.
Contact data, which includes email addresses and phone numbers, are vital pieces of information that businesses use daily. But you should also consider data types that focus on company and customer behavior including financial decisions, interactions with other enterprises, and hierarchy changes.
Here are different sources to consider:
First-Party Data: Data that is gathered and analyzed in-house from social media, email campaigns, and CRM systems. It’s the most cost-effective way to get data, but also the most time-consuming.
Second-Party Data: This can be acquired by an outside company that has collected and filtered their own first-party data.
Third-Party Data: Data that comes from data aggregators who pull, clean, and organize data from numerous places. Data aggregators specialize in data-crawling and other automated systems, pulling from different enterprises.
Using various sources of data fills in gaps and offers different perspectives in completing account profiles.
ZoomInfo covers fit, intent, and opportunity data with scoops, news alerts, and our ever-famous org charts. With our up-to-date data and your 360-degree customer view model, you better predict the success of a future upsell.
A Customer 360-degree Data Model
A 360-degree model helps pinpoints where customers are at financially and what their future is in their market. This allows you to better design content and communications to attract them before competitors can.
Steps to complete your 360-degree view with data
Here are some steps you can take with your digital systems to complete your 360-degree customer views:
- Find which systems offer an open ecosystem, so you don’t have to depend on just one company for digital tools.
- Identify scattered customer records across all platforms, servers, and other digital homes.
- Figure out which records are accurate and throw others in the bin.
- Gather all remaining data (except the master files).
- Offer customers the opportunity to give or confirm data.
Key Takeaways
Misaligned data can ultimately lead to failed campaigns, disgruntled customers, and broken business relationships.
Managing buying cycles and overall customer relationships are made easier when data is “rolled up” into a single view. According to a study done by Gartner, 95% of buying groups revisit decisions at least once as new information emerges to them.
If you try to analyze an account with differing profiles and mismatched information, your messaging is not going to stick.