The 360-degree customer view. What is it? For whom? What for?

We live in an era of intense competition. While businesses have always competed for resources, markets, ideas, and customer attention, now they’re battling for the ability to rapidly test hypotheses and adapt. This need is driven by a customer-centric approach—the goal of creating the best product for the customer in the classic price/quality paradigm. The company that can most effectively understand its customers and swiftly modify its product will ultimately win. This is a winning strategy. The concept of Product, here and further in this article will be used in the broad understanding of this word – product/service and the entire life cycle of the client from its receipt, support, and transition to an improved product/service.

Therefore, creating a customer-aware culture within an organization is essential to developing successful products.  It should be consistent and systemic rather than ad hoc. Various tools can help us formalize and digitize the behavioral patterns of individual customers and their groups (cohorts/clusters). We’re talking about various analytics systems.

Let’s say we’re using a popular analytics system to collect data about our website’s visitors. We can see graphs, numbers, and letters. But don’t relax just yet, because we’ve only completed the first and simplest part of data collection. To use this data to form and test hypotheses, we need to understand what exactly it’s telling us. In other words, we need to model user behavior, at least in our minds. We need to answer questions like: What did this specific person do? Why did the person do it that way? And was the person satisfied? Customer 360 is an analytical tool that, when used correctly, can help us answer some of these questions.

The 360 customer view is a comprehensive set of measures and tools that allow for the consolidation of accumulated data from various information systems (such as ERP, CRM, etc.) and analytical systems (such as GA) to enhance the understanding of customer behavior. As mentioned before, we do this to better understand how we need to modify our product.

Here are some examples of 360 customer view implementations.

Example #1: The Cinema Business

Let’s consider a cinema business that aims to make the customer experience in theaters as enjoyable, convenient, and comfortable as possible for a large audience. For the sake of brevity, I’ll intentionally omit the obvious business goal of generating profit. However, we understand this is a fundamental objective for all businesses except non-profits.

So, we have multiple channels for selling tickets: a mobile app, a website, and in-theater box offices. As any professional manager would, we invest in marketing and its offspring, advertising. We promote our films both outdoors and online, using CPC (Cost Per Click) advertising on Google.

After a few days, we start analyzing the data. Our ERP system shows that for the 7 PM show-times of “Gone with the Wind” last Monday, we sold 200 out of 300 available tickets. Moreover, online sales accounted for 50% of total sales, while the remaining 50% were offline purchases. However, our advertising expenses were distributed differently: 40% for offline and 60% for CPC.

The initial conclusion is that acquiring a customer through the online sales channel is more expensive than through the offline channel.

Now, let’s consider this situation in the context of a 360-degree customer view.

With the customer 360 implemented, we can see in a single, consolidated report that 18% of our customers who purchased tickets at the offline point of sale (cinema) had previously watched trailers on our website. Additionally, 2% of those who bought tickets through the mobile app also watched trailers on the website (following a link in our email newsletter).

So, this example demonstrates, that our previous conclusion about the cost of customer acquisition through different channels without the 360-degree customer view was inaccurate.

Example #2: Complex Sales Funnel

Imagine a business with a complex sales process where lead generation and sales are handled by separate teams. This is common in industries like real estate, where one team might focus on generating leads for apartment sales, renovations, etc., while another team handles the actual sales process.

In our example, the lead generation team creates various online advertising campaigns (not just CPC) targeting potential customers. When a potential customer shows interest and submits a form on the website, their contact information is captured and passed on to the sales team.

Let’s say we run an advertising campaign for a week that costs $1000 and generates 500 website visitors. Out of these, 100 visitors submit inquiries and are considered “leads.” This data is then passed to the sales team. The next campaign, targeting a different audience, costs $2000 and generates only 80 leads.

After a month, we look at our CRM data and see that 500 people have become customers. Without a 360-degree view, it’s difficult to correlate this data with the previous campaign data.

In our 360-degree analytics report, we see that out of 100 leads, we acquired 3 customers in a month (a 3% conversion rate). However, a subsequent advertising campaign targeting a different audience segment, which generated 80 leads, converted into 10 customers in a month (a 12.5% conversion rate). If we add the advertising costs for the first audience and simplify by assuming that our product price is the same for all customers, we can draw numerical conclusions about the quality of our lead groups (the quality of the traffic we’re driving to our website).

Lead Group 1: -$1000 + 3 * $1000 = $2000

Lead Group 2: -$2000 + 10 * $1000 = $8000

This simplified example of 360-degree analytics for a real company demonstrates that only by analyzing the entire sales cycle and having a 360-degree view can we accurately assess the quality of our audiences and develop effective business strategies. A crucial aspect that ChatGPT and other AI models often overlook is the specific context of your business and market.

Therefore, 360-degree analytics has the necessary and sufficient conditions for implementation.

Necessary conditions:

• availability of online and offline segments of lead generation and/or sales
• A product lifecycle that involves both online and offline interactions (remember, we’re not just talking about sales, but the entire cycle: interest, sale, support, upgrade)
• A complex sales process

Sufficient conditions:

• availability of information systems and customer data collection systems
• a unified customer data model collected from various information systems
• a Product Owner (PO) who understands the goals to be achieved with this tool
• availability of the authorization function on your site

And what examples do you know of using the 360-degree customer view?