Time to view customers through a 360° lens
- Summary:
- Why the need for a 360° view of the customer has never been greater.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution is revolutionising the world we live in.
Everything and everyone is connected, all the time and everywhere.
Business is becoming the platform of change where platforms are doing well by doing good.
Work is changing, with new skills, new demands and new opportunities being created for all.
Behind all of these things are people. And it's for that reason that, for the past 20 years, we have been focused on one single, most important thing: customer success - helping companies connect with their customers when, where and how they want.
Today, connected technologies can be harnessed for customer success. It's what customers are demanding and what businesses must look at in order to keep up with competitors, remain relevant and also keep their customers happy. But where do businesses begin?
Customers want to be connected
First and foremost, businesses need to understand that customers want to be connected to brands. In fact, 70% of customers say connected experiences — an engagement with a brand that reflects an understanding of past actions, product usage, and a host of other personalised factors - are very important to winning their business.
Customers want a consistent experience when connecting with companies - no matter if that's through an interaction with a service agent or shopping for the latest handbag. However, quite often this isn't the case and experiences are disconnected, whether that is a support agent who doesn't have historical view of previous purchases; an email marketing offer for the same product that was purchased just hours before; or a service representative who instructs the customer to reach out through a separate channel for additional assistance because they don’t have all the relevant information at their fingertips.
But experiences are being siloed
As frustrating as it is for the customer, its equally annoying for companies. These silos mean that staff on a shop floor or in a customer service environment are viewing each customer in a fragmented way and as a result, can't provide customers with the experience they want or need. Critical information that makes up a complete customer profile is usually spread across multiple systems within a business, meaning that disconnect results in an average customer interaction at best.
One of the biggest problems here is that traditional methods used to unify customer data and plug it back into engagement platforms and applications require a huge amount of IT resource. This means that it is also difficult to update when organisations are tasked with delivering new, personalised customer experiences quickly.
We all want to deliver connected customer experiences across channels and departments. But to be effective, these experiences must span siloed organisations, processes and infrastructure across marketing, commerce, sales and service.
Using data to get the full view
Amazon really did set the bar when it comes to connected, cross-channel experiences. It offers us product recommendations both online and in the mobile app. After you order a product, customers receive emails and SMS messages, confirming their orders and providing shipping updates. They also receive suggestions for other related products. If there is an issue, it's easy to create a case and an agent already has all the information they need to solve the problem. The company has officially blurred the lines between commerce, marketing and service.
Yet many traditional organisations still struggle to deliver this type of experience. These companies need a new way to empower their organisations to manage and create connected customers experiences that surface the right information to the right people at the right time.
To do this, businesses must create a single view of the customer and working with technology partners to help achieve this is key. It relies on a secure and trusted pipeline of connectivity between data sources, having the tools and capabilities to reconcile customer data, and finally, actually using this single view to make smart recommendations.
By having all your information in one place across marketing, sales, B2B commerce and commerce, the customer experience can be completely transformed. At Dreamforce this year, we announced Customer 360 to help businesses do just that.
We're living in a world where the customer is always right. Because of this, businesses can't afford not to be built around the customer. It's time for organisations to deliver connected and personalised experiences, working with a platform that can use insights from across the business to provide the experiences customers want today.