What Is Customer 360 and Why Does It Matter to Your Business?

Do you want to personalize your interactions with your customers? It’s often harder than many businesses expect. Successfully customized interactions require that you get a clear picture of your customers first. While gathering more customer data is the reasonable next step, the sheer amount of information you can collect can complicate the process.

Customer data comes in many forms, such as transaction information, psychographics, website visits, survey results, and location data, to name a few. It can easily overwhelm a business, which is why more and more organizations are adopting customer 360 to their processes. 

If you’ve wondered, “What is customer 360?” this article is for you. Get to know what customer 360 is and why it matters to your business.

What is Customer 360?

Customer 360 provides your business with a holistic view of who your customers are through unified customer profiles. According to IBM, it’s ideal for companies that gather customer data from various sources and want to take advantage of it to craft customized communications. 

Customer intelligence platforms, like Inquiro, can visualize the data you gather from different sources into a convenient customer dashboard, enabling you to draw valuable insights about your customers’ purchase intent and interests. 

The holistic customer profiles generated from Customer 360 platforms include a variety of information, including the following:

• Demographics
• Purchase Behavior
• Interest
• Points of Interest
• Persona 
• Connectivity

Customer 360 as a concept 

The ultimate aim of customer 360 is to help you gain a deeper understanding of your customers to create highly personalized experiences. These tailored interactions increase your business’ value to your customers, enrich your relationship with them, and give you a competitive advantage.

For instance, you can learn where certain customers are on the customer journey. With this information, you can push marketing messages optimized to nudge customers along the path to purchase. Another example is to help verify and score leads to understand which customers you should trust more than the others. 

How Customer 360 works 

A dedicated customer 360 platform, such as Inquiro, derives valuable insights from customer data that provides a straightforward process to those that aren’t as technically savvy. 

You can gather data from multiple sources: websites, marketing efforts, social media engagement, sales and accounts teams, customer service, and more. The customer data is uploaded into a dashboard that enriches the understanding of customers, and better determines their demographics, purchase intent, and interests. It’s no surprise that the customer 360 database is one of a business’s most valuable assets in improving its value offerings.

Why Does Customer 360 Matter to Your Business?

Successful business decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Customer intelligence platforms help you analyze your gathered customer data to make smarter choices and form informed strategies. But the benefits of customer 360 aren’t only external but internal, as well. Below are a few ways customer 360 can help your business. 

The Benefits of Customer 360 

Helps predict customer behavior 

Launching products or crafting clever and sharp campaigns becomes much easier once you understand more about whom you’re selling to in the first place. Customer 360 avoids guesswork and constructs a sophisticated view of your customers. 

These insights will help you create experiences bound to appeal to your target audiences or even allow you to acquire new ones.

Offers data visualization and overcomes data siloing 

A significant challenge in businesses is data siloing, where data from different channels are isolated, leading to problems such as duplicate entries, lack of transparency, and outdated information. A 2022 survey found that over half (52%) of financial leaders across the US and Canada cited data silos as significant hurdles to innovation. 

Customer 360 offers an easy way to visualize data and digest insights to further understand customer behavior through graph visualization. 

With customer 360 data visualization, businesses can avoid data siloing and keep the entire team in the loop since all pertinent customer data is easily comprehensible and available to everyone, resulting in an efficient streamlining of your systems. 

Improves inter-departmental collaboration

If the sales, marketing, and service teams receive the same data, it’s easier for them to collaborate and build creative solutions for business problems. For instance, if the service team discovers a way to cross-sell their products, they can easily discuss the opportunity with marketing by referencing the same data. 

How to implement Customer 360 in your business

Segment customers for personalized offers 

Customer 360 enables you to segment your customers based on various data points, such as location or purchase history, to develop and launch customized offers per segment. Inquiro offers targeting APIs to help you select the preferred recipients of your messages.

Assess risks in dealing with certain customers 

Customer 360 can provide businesses, such as insurance companies and financial services, with the customer information they need to determine whether the client they’re dealing with is trustworthy to prevent fraud. Inquiro, for example, has scoring APIs that will help you measure your customers’ trustworthiness from a behavioral point of view.

Get a Panoramic View of Your Customers

A growing number of customers expect businesses to deliver customized experiences to them. Although digital solutions have made it easier for businesses to gather data and information about their buyers, a disorganized system can weaken a company’s efforts. 

Customer 360 builds consumer profiles from the data gathered from different consumer touchpoints and compiles them into an accessible customer dashboard with which an entire business can interact. 

360º Customer Dashboard provides valuable customer insights within your reach, automatically updating with new data and giving you a holistic view of your customers. The powerful profiling tool empowers you to forge closer relationships with your customers through audience segmentation features.

Book a demo with Inquiro today to learn how we can elevate your Customer 360 experience.