How To Build a 360° Customer View To Boost Customer Visibility

Having a profound understanding of your customers and their behavior is not just a competitive advantage but an absolute necessity. Especially in the case of a SaaS business, having clear visibility of customers not only helps in better customer engagement but also helps to drive proactive customer success which can improve customer experience and ensure retention. This is precisely where the 360-degree customer view comes into play - it is a potent tool that empowers companies to truly comprehend their customers' preferences and needs, to provide tailored solutions and ultimately deliver the desired value.

What is a 360° Customer View?

Customer 360 is a business strategy that aims to create a comprehensive, unified view of a customer across all touchpoints and interactions with a company. The main objective behind creating a 360° customer view is to provide organizations with complete customer visibility and enable them to better understand customer behavior. This holistic view helps businesses deliver more personalized and relevant experiences, improve customer satisfaction, and consequently - drive customer loyalty.

What are customer touchpoints?

It's like building a jigsaw puzzle with all the pieces. You gather data from all the places your customer interacts with your product (and company). All of this data becomes the foundation for understanding your customers in-depth and gaining clear visibility.

1. Feature & Support Tickets

These can give your Customer Success Managers (CSMs) insights into customers' needs and wants.

2. Feedback Metrics

Stuff like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) scores to gauge your customers' happiness.

3. Financial Data

Subscription details – because money matters, right?

4. Product Usage

How are they using your product?

5. CSM Sentiment

How they feel about your customer service.

6. Communication Touchpoints

Everywhere they've communicated with you.

Benefits of a 360-Degree Customer View

Building a 360-customer view is a holistic approach to customer data collection and analysis that can give an organization the ability to engage in personalized communication with their customers and provide them with targeted and more personalized solutions to their customers. Here's how businesses can revolutionize their customer success strategy with a 360-degree customer view.

1. Improved Customer Experience

One of the primary advantages is the ability to have personalized engagement with customers. The data from various customer touchpoints such as product data, CRM data, ticketing data, feature request data, subscription, and invoicing data, and data from emails and communications can help businesses gain deeper insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. This insight can help to precisely identify customer issues and hence deliver more pointed and accurate solutions.

Personalized communication can also foster a strong emotional connection with customers - making them feel valued and consequently improving their experience.

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Check out how clear customer visibility can shape your customer engagement.

2. Increased Customer Retention

Using a Customer-360 view, businesses can use historical data and predictive analysis to proactively identify the customers at risk of churning. A comprehensive customer data repository can help businesses recognize patterns and behaviors associated with churn and take proactive measures to retain these customers.

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This proactive approach can prevent minor issues from escalating into major grievances, reducing the likelihood of customers churning due to dissatisfaction.

3. Cross-selling and Upselling Opportunities

A comprehensive customer view allows for monitoring existing customers' usage patterns and needs.

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For example, you can track how often they use certain features, how many users they have, or how their data storage needs have increased over time.

With the help of this information, you can effectively tailor your upsell strategies to offer additional features or higher-tier plans that align with the customer's evolving needs.

Upselling is often based on the value and ROI that the customers will gain from the upgraded solution. A 360-degree customer view can provide data from their usage history to showcase how the proposed upsell with address specific pain points or optimize their business processes.

4. Customer Loyalty and Advocacy

Personalized experiences and proactive engagement foster customer loyalty - reducing the reliance on costly customer acquisition strategies. Satisfied customers are more likely to become advocates and promote a business through word-of-mouth and referrals.

Technology and Tools For Creating a Customer-360 View

Achieving a comprehensive understanding of your customer portfolio requires a sophisticated technological approach. These tech-driven tools harmonize data from various customer touchpoints to provide a cohesive and unified view of all customer data.

In the current times, augmented by artificial intelligence and machine learning, these technologies not only centralize data but also unlock actionable insights, provide predictive analysis, and optimize your CS strategy to ultimately elevate customer engagement and foster business growth.

Can a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software help?

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Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful tool that can help businesses track and manage their interactions and relationships with customers. However, it may not be infallible and might miss certain interactions due to its sales-focused nature, data limitations, integration challenges, and other factors

Let's talk about why a CRM might not be a perfect choice to obtain a Customer 360-degree view:

DIY Process: You need to build the whole data-gathering process from scratch.
Not So Fresh: It might not always be up-to-date with the latest information
No Customer Health Score: You won't find a real "customer health score" in there. Maybe you can find a workaround, but it will not be deep enough to take action.
No Predictive Powers: Missing out on predictive capabilities.
Hard to Share Data: Sharing data in context with the team is often difficult.
Costly Endeavor: It can get pricey, needing certified administrators or IT experts who focus on the customer success teams' requirement
Snail-Paced Reporting: Getting real-time data is critical, but with CRM, since there is a lack of data and reports, you may not get real-time data.

Significance of a Customer Success Platform

A customer success platform can serve as the backbone for implementing and leveraging a 360-degree customer view. A customer success platform can effectively provide the necessary infrastructure to collect, analyze, and act upon customer data.

A CS platform is designed to enhance customer engagement, improve customer satisfaction, help drive proactive customer success, and ultimately improve retention rate and foster customer relationships. They enable businesses to not only track key performance indicators like NPS, CSAT, or NRR - but also identify the customers at risk of churning and help businesses tailor interactions to customer needs and forecast customer behavior and usage patterns.

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Check out this article that discusses the significance of a Customer Success Platform in detail.

ZapScale: A 3-Step Journey to Building A 360° Customer View

Let's explore how ZapScale can provide you with the coveted Customer 360:

Step 1: Link ZapScale with your product and other customer interaction tools like CRM, tickets, emails, and payments. It slurps up data from over 150 data points across six different sources.

Step 2: Once it's connected to your system, you'll see a unified view of all your customer info – a 360-degree view.

Step 3: ZapScale's super-smart algorithm dives into the data and gives you a super-detailed customer health score. It's like having a crystal ball for customer well-being.

This health score looks at 40 pre-built KPIs in ZapScale. If you want, you can even customize them based on different customer groups – like lifecycle stage or location. It's like having a customer health checkup, and you can spot risks and opportunities pronto.

With ZapScale's Customer Health Score, you can tailor your interactions to their needs at every stage.

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ZapScale's Holistic Customer 360 View:

With ZapScale's holistic Customer 360 view, you get a range of benefits that significantly contribute to the enhancement of your customer success strategy:

It identifies at-risk customers early, enabling Customer Success Managers to intervene promptly, troubleshoot issues, and prevent churn. Read more.
This comprehensive data repository boosts efficiency by streamlining workflows and refining customer interactions.
The ability to spot potential churn-inducing problems empowers companies to enhance retention rates, thereby safeguarding profitable customer relationships.
The personalized touch facilitated by a 360-degree view leads to heightened customer satisfaction and loyalty, further enriching the overall experience.
The accumulated data aids in making accurate forecasts about customer behavior and usage patterns, supporting revenue projections and growth planning.
This multifaceted approach also uncovers upsell opportunities, optimizing the potential for additional product or service sales.
Identifying enthusiastic customer advocates who can champion your brand.
The capability to track crucial metrics, including retention, usage, and revenue, contributes to effective performance measurement and informed decision-making, ensuring your customer success strategies remain on the right track.

Conclusion

Embracing a 360° Customer View empowers customer success teams to navigate the realm of predictive success to ensure that every interaction is memorable and every customer challenge is met with agility.

With a robust Customer 360 strategy, SaaS organizations can not only predict customer churn and troubleshoot issues early on but also optimize workflows to streamline customer interactions and enhance efficiency. It acts as a positive catalyst for driving proactive customer success to safeguard valuable customer relationships and foster customer loyalty.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is a 360-degree Customer View?

A 360-degree customer view integrates data from all customer touchpoints like product usage, support interaction, and feedback to create a complete profile. This helps businesses understand customer behaviour and preferences comprehensively.

2. Why is a 360-degree customer view important?

It allows businesses to personalise business interactions, predict churn, identify upsell opportunities, and improve overall customer satisfaction and loyalty through data-driven insights.

3. What technology is needed to build a 360-degree customer view?

Implementing a 360-degree customer view requires tools like Customer Success Platforms, CRM systems, data integration tools, and analytics/AI tools to collect, integrate, analyse, and derive actionable insights from customer data effectively.