Customer 360: What It Is, Why It Matters and How to Build One
![Banner image of Profisee blog with the title: "Customer 360 ? What, Why & How? [2024]".](https://profisee.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Skyscraper-Customer360_Featured.jpg.webp)
Updated: August 2, 2024
Today, organizations are accumulating exponentially larger volumes of customer data, which often becomes fragmented, duplicated, inconsistent, incomplete, ungoverned and out-of-date as it travels throughout the organization.
Factor in the data management issues across the potentially thousands of records (and not to mention the scores of touchpoints with each buyer) and it’s easy to see why companies have trouble answering basic questions like:
- Who are my most profitable customers?
- Where do I have up- and cross-sell opportunities with existing accounts?
- Which of my marketing efforts are driving increased purchasing behavior?
- How can I improve customer service?
To answer these questions, organizations are turning to Customer 360 solutions to help identify and understand their buyers. With a better understanding of your audience’s behavior, you can increase revenue, reduce costs, identify inefficiencies and improve the customer experience.
If you’re ready to dive into the specifics of a 360-degree view of the customer, continue reading below.
Key Takeaways
A Customer 360 view identifies who a customer is, what they buy and how they interact across your channels.
The payoff from Customer 360 solutions shows up in cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, higher conversion rates, lower compliance risk and cleaner data for AI.
Most tools sold as a Customer 360, such as CDPs, CRMs and data catalogs, only master buyer data, so they miss the product, supplier and location context that real business questions depend on.
Profisee delivers a multidomain Customer 360 that maintains the golden record behind the view and connects buyer data to other domains, giving teams context a single-domain tool cannot.
What is a Customer 360 view?
Customer 360 view is the concept of having all your customer data in one place. However, it can have different (and oftentimes conflicting) definitions depending on who you ask.
Some vendors, publications and analysts consider a Customer 360 to be a hub containing all their customer data. Others view it as the primary domain of some data management tools like a master data management (MDM) system or data warehouse. Some people say it is one or the other of these things but enriched with external data, such as social media profiles, employer information and more.
It can be difficult to determine which data to include in a Customer 360 view because of the marketing hype that vendors use to sell products. As such, some claim it requires buyer interactions. Others maintain it involves transactional data, while some say it simply requires static records such as customer demographic information or master data in one place.
Others claim that Customer 360s must import or integrate with external data sources, i.e., Dun & Bradstreet for financial services companies. There are also Customer 360 proponents selling the idea that it involves all the above, insinuating that solutions with just some of these capabilities are insufficient.
Customer 360 platforms only offer a part of the solution, in that nearly all real-world business challenges involve buyer data and other information like the products they buy, locations they visit or campaigns they engage with.
While a Customer 360 vendor may claim that their platform can master over 100 buyer attributes, it will not truly add business value if a user cannot analyze those in the context of the 25 product attributes their audience actually interacts with.
Rather than approaching each of these data categories, or domains, individually or sequentially, it is important to view them holistically and consider how they together make up the 360-degree view of a customer. Using MDM to understand these domains together will exponentially add more business value than adding another siloed application that only works with a subset of data.
Which Channels Involve a Customer 360?
Channel visibility is another key consideration for implementing Customer 360. Today, many companies have an omnichannel approach to sales and communications, further compounding the amount of buyer data they need to manage. Customer channels can include:
- In-person at a company-owned, brick-and-mortar location
- Phone order through sales affiliate or partner
- Online through a company website or mobile app
Regardless of what communication channels your buyers use, it is imperative to understand who they are and how they interact with your business. For example, a pizza place should know it’s interacting with the same customer whether they do so via a mobile application, their website, a phone call, in the cloud or even across different retail locations. Domino’s, for example, used Customer 360 analytics to cut duplicate direct-mail campaigns and reduce marketing spend.
This example hits at the core of why it is important to thoughtfully consider which data is included in a Customer 360 view. Whichever data is involved must provide this visibility to the enterprise, so buyers get the same experience no matter how they interact with the organization.
Common Customer Data Problems Solved with a 360 Customer View
Multi-channel communication only works when there’s consistency in the underlying customer data and how it is managed. It is difficult to provide that consistency when there’s often inconsistent data about the same buyer spread across several IT systems, each of which may include data for every communication channel. True Customer 360s provide that consistency regardless of how many sources are involved.
Another widespread problem that Customer 360 views can help solve is related to data quality. Oftentimes, the same buyer’s name (or address, phone number, etc.) is represented differently in disparate systems, or even within the same system.
For example, John Doe might be spelled in several ways, like Jonathan Doe, Jon Doe, Johnny Doe or some other variation. Street addresses might be spelled out or abbreviated; phone numbers could include dashes and hyphens (or not). Each of these points of distinction makes it difficult to tell whether the person in one system is the same in another, and business applications like CRM and ERP systems often do little to enforce consistency within their customer data.
Customer 360s attempt to resolve this issue so users can identify which person or business constitutes a single entity and include their attributes for informed interactions with them. Without a 360-degree view of customers, leveraging third-party external sources like Dun & Bradstreet or social media data becomes difficult because there is no standardization for the buyer records representation.
How a Customer 360 Platform Benefits Your Business
A comprehensive, 360-degree view of your customers and every interaction with them pays off in two ways: “offensive” benefits that grow revenue and “defensive” benefits that reduce financial risks for your business:
- Higher revenue: Clear account histories reveal cross-sell and up-sell opportunities with existing buyers.
- More personalized marketing: Campaigns reach each buyer with relevant offers, which drives higher conversion rates – BCG research found personalized offers consistently generate three times higher ROI than mass promotions.
- Better retention: A complete picture of each account helps teams keep buyers longer.
- Smarter segmentation: Profitability data across products and services lets you group customers by meaningful trends.
- Safer credit terms: Accurate account data lowers the risk of offering unfavorable credit terms.
- Easier privacy compliance: Newer privacy regulations require organizations to secure personal data and provide it on request, and a single view puts that data in one place.
- Lower overall risk: Reliable data supports general risk management, a critical need for financial service firms.
- Trustworthy analytics: Consistent profiles give business intelligence tools accurate inputs, so dashboards and reports reflect what actually happens.
The Challenges of Implementing a Customer 360
The biggest challenges to implementing a Customer 360 come from fragmented, inconsistent master data. Here’s how to solve each challenge:
| Challenge | Why it matters | How to solve it |
|---|---|---|
| Fragmented master data | Records sit in different warehouses and systems, each with its own format, dimensions and definitions. | Bring every source into one MDM platform, then sync the golden record back to each system so every application reads the same clean record. |
| Inconsistent governance | Marketing and sales tools, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platforms and Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) each represent information differently, which leaves no single version of the truth. | Define one data model and one set of data policies in MDM, then enforce them across every connected source. |
| Poor data quality | Records contain missing, overlapping, conflicting, outdated and inaccurate information. | Apply automated match-and-merge rules and survivorship rules to remove duplicates and keep the most reliable value for each field. |
| Complex conflicts | Some contradictory records need a person to review them before teams trust the result. | Route those records to data stewardship workflows, where stewards settle them and the platform learns from human decisions. |
| Compounding errors | Mistakes in customer records spread into the analysis of product purchase history and other linked domains. | Master customer, product and supplier data in the same multidomain MDM environment so a fix in one place reaches every linked record. |
See how MDM can maximize the impact of your CDP.
Why Should I Care About a Customer 360?
There are many reasons you should care about a Customer 360, with the high cost of mishandling data sitting at the top of the list. Improperly managed information results in missed sales and marketing opportunities and makes it difficult to manage regulatory compliance regarding how to manage consumer data.
Poorly managed customer data costs businesses in five other ways:
1. Stricter Privacy Regulations
Several regulations have emerged in this area with costly penalties for non-compliance, and more are on the horizon. Current examples of this include the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), both of which aim to give individuals control over their personal data while mandating that controllers and processors of personal data, i.e., your organization, employ the appropriate technical measures to implement specific data-protection principles.
2. Poor Customer Experiences
Companies can put their reputation and goodwill on the line when they poorly manage information. As an example, if a customer service representative does not know whether they are speaking to a buyer even after they have identified themselves, or perhaps doesn’t know which products or services the audience has, companies create risk through the poor experience that is caused by low-quality records.
3. Decentralized Customer Data
A more distributed records landscape and a growing stack of business apps have spread buyer information further than ever, which makes quality harder to preserve. A Customer 360 addresses two types of data quality:
- Absolute data quality: Fields sit empty or hold incorrect information, so teams reach out with the wrong details or miss the account entirely. A Customer 360 flags those gaps as errors and fills them from other trusted sources, so every profile ends up complete.
- Relative data quality: Fields hold complete information, but each system represents it differently, such as “Jon Doe” in the CRM and “Jonathan Doe” in the ERP. A Customer 360 links those variations to one person and keeps the most reliable version of each detail.
Once the records agree, every team works from the same accurate profile, no matter which system the data came from.
4. Hidden Demand and Sentiment Signals
Without a Customer 360, you lose sight of demand for your products, services and supplies. Accurate sentiment analysis also falls out of reach, which leaves you guessing about what people say about your company and its offerings.
5. Unreliable AI and Machine Learning Results
Machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) power real-time recommendations, micro-segmentation and targeted offers. These tools also magnify every flaw in the records they consume. Flawed training data produces faulty models, and good models fed poor-quality inputs return wrong results.
A Gartner survey found 63% of organizations either do not have or are unsure if they have the right data management practices for AI. Without the right foundation, AI and ML mislead the teams that rely on them, waste resources and make root-cause analysis close to impossible.
Customer master data management supports these technologies in two ways:
- By standardizing the data AI and ML consume, which lowers the risk behind every output.
- By using machine learning to match and group similar records, learning from data stewards’ decisions and suggesting those actions later to speed up the work.
How Do I Get a 360 Customer View?
You get a 360 customer view by bringing every buyer record into one master data management solution. A tool that resolves duplicates and conflicts into a single golden record and shares that information with every system that needs it is the one you’ll use to get a 360 customer view.
Vendors often sell CDPs, CRMs and augmented data catalogs as a Customer 360 solution, but these systems cover only a slice of the work:
- Customer data platforms (CDPs): A CDP connects to marketing databases so marketers can build profiles and run campaigns. It offers little records quality control and thin matching, with no support for linking or grouping, so it falls short for customer service and enterprise data management.
- Customer relationship management (CRM) systems: A CRM manages sales interactions but offers neither management nor data governance. Duplicate records and low trust follow, which is why a CRM should not serve as the system of record for customer information.
- Augmented data catalogs: An augmented data catalog pairs metadata management with some customer records management. As a newer category, it lacks the matching, merging and survivorship rules behind a trusted golden record.
Master data management is the best fit for a Customer 360 because it combines data modeling, integration and quality in one place. A multidomain MDM platform works as a central hub, syncs the golden record back to every source system and connects buyer information to product, supplier and location data. Choose a platform over a pre-built “360 application,” since a single-domain application needs heavy changes to fit the business and keeps each domain in a separate environment.
Download your copy of our Customer 360: the comprehensive guide to keep in your back pocket.
How to Build a Customer 360 Dashboard
An important piece of many Customer 360 initiatives is having dashboards that visualize information and important metrics about buyers. Dashboards make it easy to spot trends at a glance and get a quick overview of how much money people are spending, whether or not they’re happy, whether it looks like they will churn and more.
The process of building a Customer 360 dashboard will vary from organization to organization, but in general, it looks like this:
- Identify data sources and integrate data: Determine which data you want or need to use in your dashboard and identify the source systems for it. Common sources include CRMs, CDPs and ERPs. From there, integrate the records using an MDM tool like Profisee to get it all in one place.
- Use MDM to clean and standardize the data: Define a data model for your customer master data and configure the system to enforce your data governance policies. Next, clean and standardize your data to match and merge similar records, remove duplicates, optionally enrich them with third-party information and standardize them according to your data governance rules. That way your Customer 360 dashboard is an accurate representation of your buyers’ purchase history and behavior and won’t lead to incorrect conclusions.
- Connect your MDM tool to a business intelligence solution: Now that your data is usable, you can load it into a business intelligence (BI) or analytics solution by connecting it to your MDM tool. For example, using Profisee’s native integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem, you can connect Profisee to Microsoft Power BI or Microsoft Fabric to start building the dashboard. Profisee can also integrate with other tools like Tableau and Qlik.
- Design your dashboard: Determine which metrics about your audience are important enough to include in your dashboard. Commonly used metrics include churn rate, customer lifetime value and satisfaction scores, but you may want to include others depending on your situation.
- Query the data you loaded into your BI tool for those metrics: Create visualizations for your selected KPIs using elements like graphs, charts and tables. Some commonly used visualizations include gauge charts, scorecards, line graphs, scatterplots, box-and-whisker plots and tables, but you should choose the visualizations that best serve your purposes.
- Publish your dashboard and set the refresh rate: When you’re happy with the way your dashboard looks, it’s time to hit publish. Many BI solutions will let you create a shareable link or embed code that you can share with relevant stakeholders or embed on a website or portal like SharePoint.
- Adjust your report settings to refresh at the rate you need: You can set your dashboard to refresh on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, so that people using your Customer 360 analytics see results based on data from the correct time frame.
Take Master Data Management Beyond Customer 360 with Profisee
Customer 360 is just a piece of the puzzle when it comes to managing your company’s data estate and leveraging it as a source of competitive advantage. While your immediate problem may include the lack of a unified buyer view and the inherent challenges that come with that, like knowing your most profitable customer, you will need to manage your product, supplier, asset or location data. And you need a platform that can scale with your needs.
Profisee builds and maintains the golden record behind a Customer 360 with:
- Central data governance: Teams define one data model for customer records and set policies that Profisee enforces across every source.
- Flexible deployment: Profisee is the only MDM available as SaaS, PaaS, IaaS, hybrid or on-premises, and it runs on Microsoft Azure, AWS or Google Cloud.
- Automated record matching: Machine learning merges similar entries, removes duplicates and learns from data stewards’ decisions to speed up future work.
- Built-in AI assistant: Aisey creates rules, attributes and models in a click and answers questions in chat, so data teams stand up a Customer 360 faster.
- Human review: Stewardship workflows route conflicting entries to the right people, so hard cases get a human’s judgment.
- Two-way sync: Profisee pushes the trusted golden record back to CRM, ERP and other source systems, so every team works from the same profile.
- Live integrations: REST APIs and webhooks send customer updates to connected systems in real time, alongside native links to Microsoft Purview and Power Platform.
Profisee goes live in under 90 days, with business teams in control of their own data. Book a Profisee demo to see how multidomain MDM builds the golden record behind a Customer 360 that your marketing, sales and service teams can act on.
CUSTOMER 360 resources
There are many resources out there where you can learn more about realizing a 360° view of the customer. Read our full guide on the what, why and how of your customer 360.
