The Customer 360: Creating unified customer views for more effective sales and marketing

Customer 360s are essential for delivering the personalized experiences that consumers expect from businesses today. Using customer data to build a deeper understanding of users and consumers is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity for organizations that want to remain competitive.

A Customer 360 is a comprehensive, unified view of every available data point for individual customers. With Customer 360-driven analytics, businesses can gain a holistic understanding of their customers' behaviors, preferences, and needs. This allows them to create individualized customer experiences, target business processes and marketing campaigns, and increase profitability.

Read on to understand everything you need to know about the Customer 360 view, including its benefits and applications, how it works, and how to overcome the challenges of creating a comprehensive, single-customer view with RudderStack.

What is a Customer 360? The RudderStack definition

Creating a Customer 360 involves building a comprehensive, unified view of every available data point for each individual customer. This view serves as a single source of truth for each customer, offering a complete picture of their journey throughout the customer lifecycle.

A Customer 360 allows businesses to gain a more holistic understanding of their customers’ behaviors, preferences, and needs. It creates a single source of truth, enabling businesses to easily extract data needed to create personalized experiences.

Understanding the benefits of a Customer 360

According to a study by Gartner, fewer than 14% of companies have a true 360-degree view of their customers. However, those that do have reported significant improvements in customer satisfaction, operational efficiency, and profitability. Let’s look at the many benefits of the Customer 360 approach in more detail.

• Improved customer experience: With a complete 360 view of the customer journey, businesses can provide personalized experiences. Data from past interactions and preferences can be used to tailor products, services, and experiences to create more satisfied customers. For instance, a business could send personalized emails with product recommendations based on a customer's browsing history.
• Better customer engagement and retention: More satisfying customer experiences reduce churn and create a loyal customer base. A Customer 360 improves understanding of customer wants and needs, allowing businesses to personalize the customer experience from end to end and build strong, lasting relationships.
• Greater operational efficiency: By integrating data from various sources and providing a single source of truth, a Customer 360 data model helps businesses streamline operations. In particular, customer 360-driven analytics can improve collaboration between Sales and Marketing teams. When both teams can access the same customer data, it’s easier for them to coordinate their efforts and work towards common goals. For example, the marketing team could create a campaign to generate leads, and the sales team could follow up on these leads using insights from the Customer 360 view.
• Improved data quality and accuracy: Building a Customer 360 involves consolidating and cleaning customer data from various sources, which improves the quality and accuracy of the data. This means that Customer 360-driven analytics provide more reliable insights and lead to better decision-making.
• Increased sales and revenue: A comprehensive view of customers allows businesses to identify opportunities for cross-selling and upselling, leading to increased sales. Moreover, satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, contributing to higher revenue.
• Enhanced marketing effectiveness: A Customer 360 enables businesses to accurately segment their customers for marketing campaigns. Segmenting customers using criteria such as purchase history, demographic information, and behavior patterns enables marketing efforts to be more effectively targeted. This results in higher conversion rates and a better return on marketing investment.

Creating a Customer 360 can be a chaotic endeavor for businesses

Creating and using a customer 360

The process of creating a customer 360 and generating business value with it involves three steps: Data integration, data unification, and data activation.

Data integration

Data integration is the process of collecting data from different sources to provide a unified view. In the context of Customer 360s, data integration involves collecting and consolidating customer data from various touchpoints and systems. Data sources might include websites, apps, CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, social media, and customer support channels. Data integration is the foundation of the Customer 360 approach, as it provides the raw data that is used to create a comprehensive view of the customer. Once data is collected and centralized, it can be unified to create a customer 360.

Data unification

Data unification to create a customer 360 can be considered part of Master Data Management (MDM). MDM involves defining and managing all of the critical data of an organization to provide a single point of reference. In the context of the Customer 360 data model, this means creating a single master record for each customer (Customer 360). This master record includes all the relevant information about the customer, such as their demographic details, purchase history, and interaction history. Data unification involves identity resolution – the process of stitching all anonymous and known identifiers together into a single master record.

Data activation

Data activation is the execution of business activities that are informed and fueled by data. This step involves both making the Customer 360 available for use by the business and the tactical application of the data. There are many data activation use cases for Customer 360. One of the primary use cases is data analytics. This involves analyzing data to discover useful insights and make informed decisions. Customer 360-driven analytics allow businesses to analyze their integrated and managed customer data to gain insights into customer behavior, preferences, and needs. These insights can be used to personalize customer experiences, predict future behavior, and make strategic decisions. Customer 360 analytics is a critical component of turning customer profiles into actionable insights. To learn more about data analytics visit the Data Analytics section of our learning center.

Creating your Customer 360 view: Best practices and challenges

Creating a 360-degree view of customers is a strategic initiative that can provide significant benefits, but it comes with its own set of challenges. By understanding the best practices alongside potential hurdles, businesses can better navigate their journey to achieving a comprehensive customer view.

Best practices

When creating a 360-degree customer view, there are several key factors to consider:

• Data quality: Ensuring the use of high-quality data is crucial. This means the data should be accurate, complete, and fresh. Poor data quality can lead to inaccurate insights and ineffective decision-making.
• Data relevance: It's important to identify and use data that is useful and relevant for your organization. Not all data is equally valuable, so businesses should focus on the data that provides the most meaningful insights about their customers.
• Data integration: Data from multiple sources should be matched and merged to create a unified view of the customer. This involves resolving inconsistencies and eliminating duplicates.
• Customer consent and transparency: Businesses should practice integrity when handling sensitive customer data. This includes obtaining customer consent for data collection and being transparent about how the data is used.
• Team education: Teams should be educated on the importance of the Customer 360 approach and how different departments can work together to achieve it. This can help foster a culture of data-driven decision-making.

Challenges

While the benefits of a Customer 360 are clear, businesses may face several challenges when creating a 360-degree view of customers:

• Data quality issues: Inconsistencies, errors, or missing information can lead to inaccuracies in the customer view. Enforcing data quality at the source can help address this issue.
• Data privacy and security: Collecting and storing customer data raises concerns about privacy and security. Businesses need to ensure they comply with data protection regulations and implement robust security measures.
• Data stack complexity: Integrating data from various sources and systems can be technically complex. It may require investment in new technology or expertise.
• Organizational and data silos: Data stored in siloes owned by different teams makes consolidating into one view difficult. Breaking down these silos requires strong leadership and a collaborative culture.

Three ways to build a Customer 360

There are three primary ways to create a Customer 360.

1. Use a legacy CDP or a SaaS tool

One approach is to use a traditional Customer Data Platform (CDP) or a Software as a Service (SaaS) tool, such as Segment, Tealium, or Salesforce Customer 360. These platforms provide pre-built solutions for collecting, integrating, and analyzing customer data. They can be quicker and easier to implement than building a Customer 360 view in-house. However, they may not offer the same level of customization and control over your data. They excel at delivering certain customer experiences, but they ultimately create an additional, incomplete data silo.

2. Build it yourself

To solve the inflexibility of traditional CDPs, businesses can decide to build a Customer 360 view in-house. This involves collecting, integrating, and analyzing customer data from various sources using your own resources. This approach gives you complete control over your data and allows you to tailor your Customer 360 data model to your specific needs. However, it can be resource-intensive and requires a high level of technical expertise. It offers flexibility and power but typically comes at too high of a cost. Building and maintaining a Customer 360 platform in-house requires significant engineering resources, and projects typically take months or even years to deliver.

3. Use a Warehouse Native CDP

A Warehouse Native CDP is a packaged platform that runs directly on the data warehouse to deliver the best of both worlds. It provides collection pipelines to ingest clean customer data, a powerful, transparent unification system to create complete customer profiles in the warehouse, and activation tools to support every use case from syncing profiles downstream to solving attribution to enabling real-time personalization. With a warehouse native CDP it’s easy to power a business with reliable, complete customer profiles so every team can make a greater impact.

Supporting business strategies with Customer 360 use cases

With a comprehensive Customer 360, businesses in every industry can deliver exceptional customer experiences that increase customer lifetime value. Here are just some examples of Customer 360 use cases in different industries:

• Retail and eCommerce: Companies in the retail industry want to provide highly personalized shopping experiences for consumers to encourage loyalty and repeat sales. Advanced audience segmentation allows marketing to optimize advertising and engagement campaigns. With a Customer 360, e-commerce platforms can also use their data to recommend products based on the browsing history and customer preferences. Furthermore, with a Customer 360 advertising teams can personalize discount offers to increase the likelihood of engagement.
• Media and entertainment: In the media and entertainment industry, businesses can use a customer 360 to understand user behavior across every platform and build comprehensive engagement strategies. For instance, a streaming platform could use Customer 360-driven analytics to recommend shows based on a viewer's watching history to increase engagement and viewing time. Companies can also use the Customer 360 to perform advanced analytics to drive future content development based on audience preferences.
• Travel and hospitality: Travel agencies and hospitality companies want to ensure unforgettable experiences for their customers, and a Customer 360 makes this possible. By integrating data from various touchpoints, such as booking platforms, social media, and customer feedback, businesses can gain a deep understanding of customer preferences, enabling them to target individuals with exclusive offers, travel tips tailored to their preferences, and even predictive bookings during peak seasons. Customer 360 data can also be used to personalize a guest's stay by providing certain amenities or arranging a special dietary meal.
• Financial solutions: Understanding customers’ financial behavior and needs enables companies to provide personalized financial solutions. For example, a bank could use customer data to recommend financial products based on the customer's financial goals and behavior or create a targeted marketing campaign engage customers around products relevant to their life stage.
• Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant Customer 360 solutions enable Healthcare and HealthTech companies to collect and unify data from healthcare practitioners, business units, and patients to increase patient quality of care and provide a consistent, tailored experience.
• Manufacturing: The Customer 360 approach can help manufacturers to proactively improve their products. For example, a car manufacturer could use the Customer 360 data to identify commonly reported issues or other signals of dissatisfaction and improve their future models to proactively reduce churn risk and build customer loyalty.

Future Customer 360 trends

The future of Customer 360 is set to be shaped by several key trends that will further enhance its ability to provide businesses with a robust understanding of their customers. These trends include advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), increased focus on privacy and security, integration with other technologies, more emphasis on customer feedback, and greater collaboration and communication.

• AI and ML: AI and ML are set to play an increasingly significant role in the development of Customer 360s. These technologies can analyze vast amounts of data more quickly and accurately than humans. Moving forward, AI and ML will enable businesses of all sizes and sophistication to leverage data insights to deliver highly personalized customer experiences.
• Privacy and security: As businesses collect and store more customer data, privacy and security will become increasingly important. Businesses will need to ensure that they are complying with data protection regulations and that they are taking steps to protect their customers' data from cyber threats. This will not only protect businesses from legal and financial penalties but will also help to build trust with their customers.
• Integration with other technologies: Customer 360s will increasingly be integrated with other technologies, such as CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and data analytics platforms. This will enable businesses to leverage their customer data across multiple platforms and departments, improving efficiency and ensuring a consistent customer experience.
• More emphasis on customer feedback: Customer feedback is a valuable source of information for businesses, and there will be an increased emphasis on incorporating this feedback into Customer 360 data models. This will enable businesses to better understand their customers' needs and expectations and to make improvements to their products, services, and customer experiences based on this feedback.
• Collaboration, partnership, and greater communication: The future of the Customer 360 approach will also see greater collaboration, partnership, and communication between businesses and their customers. By working closely with their customers and involving them in the development of products and services, businesses can ensure that they are meeting their customer's needs and expectations, driving customer satisfaction and loyalty.

By staying abreast of these trends, businesses can ensure that they are experiencing the best of Customer 360 benefits, delivering personalized customer experiences, and driving growth and profitability.d customer experiences based on this feedback.

Build a Customer 360 with RudderStack and streamline targeted sales and marketing

A Customer 360 view provides a comprehensive picture of customers’ interactions, preferences, and behaviors. With a Customer 360, businesses can deliver highly personalized experiences that drive customer loyalty and increase revenue.

As the Warehouse Native CDP, RudderStack allows you to reap the benefits of the Customer 360 approach with the security, convenience, and capabilities of your own data warehouse.

RudderStack has an open-source core and provides over 250 pre-built integrations so you can collect data from every source and send it to your entire stack. Its Profiles product, performs identity resolution in the data warehouse to create a customer 360, and data activation tooling makes it easy to power the entire business with reliable complete customer profiles.

For more information on related topics, check out 'What is Customer Data?', and 'Customer Data Analytics' in our Learning Center.