The benefits of a 360-degree customer view

The average customer shopping for a car touches over 900 digital touchpoints. We live in an era in which customers are constantly moving in and out of various digital channels and, as a result, customer journeys are becoming increasingly more complex. 

In order to make better sense of this complex customer journey, many business are building 360-degree views of their customers and reaping the benefits that this holistic representation provides.

Building a 360-degree view of the customer provides benefits to businesses across various sectors, whether it is a retailer, a healthcare provider, or a bank. The reality is that as more and more customers expand their digital footprints, they create a pool of invaluable data about their customer journey––from data on recent purchases to day-to-day interactions with the brand.

In order to truly benefit from this data, businesses must aggregate customer information, behavior and data––all in one place. This helps businesses better drive marketing and sales growth, better understand customer behavior and, most importantly, deliver a more personalized customer experience. With a 360-degree customer view, every company can have a reliable view of their customers and relevant attributes so that any employee or system has access to the customer information they need to move the customer along the customer journey.  

Here are three benefits that a 360-degree customer view provides:

1. Create more strategic sales and marketing campaigns. One of the main benefits that a 360-degree customer view provides is the ability to extend the sales and marketing teams of the business. These teams can build more strategic sales and marketing campaigns by using existing data. For example, if a retailer sees that a customer frequently purchases sneakers and athletic equipment, the sales and marketing teams can create marketing and advertising campaigns that target this interest. 
2. Understand customers and their behaviors. Another benefit of a 360-degree customer view is the ability to better understand customers, their tastes and behaviors. For example, with an aggregate customer view, healthcare providers can understand not only a patient’s holistic medical history, but also their habits and behaviors. Does the patient schedule regular annual exams? What is the patient’s medical history and what preventative measures, if any, can the health provider take?
3. Deliver more personalized shopping experiences. Perhaps one the most important benefits of a 360-degree view of the customer is that it provides the ability to deliver more personalized shopping experiences. Businesses can use aggregated, invaluable, data to provide customers with more personalized experiences across their lifetime shopping journey. For example, if a bank is aware that a customer now has new dependents that will attend college in a few years time, the bank can send personalized, saving account offerings to the customer. And, similarly, the bank can provide more personalized retirement plans down the line for the customer.

Challenges with building a 360-degree view of the customer

There are many benefits to building a 360-degree view of the customer, but businesses face challenges when it comes to actually building this unified view. One of the main challenges lies in bringing together data from disparate sources. A customer’s personal data, for example, might be stored in a CRM like Salesforce, their order history data might be in a custom legacy system, their purchase data might be in a POS system like Shopify and their social media data might be on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and the like.

So how can businesses build a 360-degree view of the customer and begin reaping the benefits that it provides? 

MuleSoft enables businesses to build a 360-degree customer view through a unified solution: Anypoint Platform. 

MuleSoft: Your partner for creating a 360-degree view of the customer

MuleSoft has helped businesses across various sectors create a 360-degree view of the customer by providing with a solution, Anypoint Platform, to integrate various applications and systems within their technology stack.  

Today, a 360-degree customer view provides great benefits to SES. Using API-led connectivity and Anypoint Platform™, SES built APIs to expose key applications, systems, and data sources. This API-led approach revolutionized the way SES’ IT team works. Using Anypoint Platform and API-led connectivity, SES was able to dramatically improve the customer experience by delivering its customer portal. Today, the portal provides customers with the ability to get insights into satellite traffic patterns and other important details, such as what websites users are visiting on the satellites’ servers. 

Learn more about SES and see how API-led connectivity can help you build a great 360-degree view of your customers.