For nearly three decades, many brands have pursued a 360-degree view of the customer. They worked to collect as much customer data as possible within one solution, such as a data lake, data warehouse, or even a CRM, to try and truly know their customers.

As utopic as the “customer 360” sounds, it’s failed to pass the “So what?” test. The massive amount of collected data hasn’t translated into a better understanding of customers.

New data privacy regulations further complicate the situation. They set new rules for collection, storage, and processing of customer data. As a result, the risks have increased for “know your customer” programs, while the rewards remain elusive.

Brands need to move past the catchy customer 360 concept and take a new approach.

The elusive 360-degree view of the customer

Throughout the evolution of the digital era, many brands viewed the 360-degree view of the customer as a key part of their growth strategies. Yet, 30 years of history – since Tom Siebel introduced the idea in the 1990s – shows the benefits of this pursuit never fully materialised.

Vendors and brands equate the creation of a 360-degree view with the goal of eliminating system silos that accumulated through decades of mergers and acquisitions. These silos have caused a lot of headaches and missed opportunities within organisations, especially IT teams. The idea of ripping them out and replacing them with one magical customer view sounds like a godsend.

Yet removing system silos is not a realistic goal for many businesses. It simply doesn’t reflect how they operate and is too expensive of an endeavour.

The truth is every system in a company’s tech landscape represents a major investment and addresses a specific business need. No single solution today can:

1. Uncover the right data and insights to deliver timely marketing emails
2. Display the best recommendations based on a customer’s last purchase
3. Anticipate how to handle a consumer’s post-purchase engagement

Preaching that a 360-degree view of the customer would solve all these challenges lacks empathy for the organisation. Tech stacks with system silos aren’t going anywhere.

Personalised customer experiences don’t stop at marketing’s door

The last few years, customer data platforms (CDPs) have become the go-to solution for brands looking to achieve the coveted 360-degree view of the customer.

Unfortunately, the reality hasn’t met the hype. Most CDPs focus on marketing use cases. This means the data collected in these solutions and the profiles they create are geared specifically for marketers.

Yet marketing isn’t the only channel for customer engagement. To increase retention and strengthen brand loyalty, companies need to deliver relevant, accurate, and in-moment experiences across all touchpoints. They need a solution that can help them uncover the right insights for every single experience and every use case, from marketing and commerce to sales and service.

Stop chasing 360, focus on use cases

Today, brands have customer profiles everywhere: CRM systems, marketing solutions, and commerce systems, to name a few. Yet the data they collect, the way it’s processed, and the output of that data are all designed to address limited scenarios.

There’s no single profile that can deliver timely information assembled from all customer data sources to all engagement systems across the organisation.

Esteban Kolsky, SAP Customer Experience’s chief evangelist, urges organisations to cease chasing this notion of a 360-degree view of customers: “The better strategy is to focus on use cases, and figure out how to get the trusted, accurate, relevant, real-time customer data for those instances.”

For example, customer care agents need an accurate log on customers’ previous purchases, information on those products, and any warranty and promotions tied to it. Marketing managers want insight on propensity to churn, customers’ interests, and preferred channels. E-commerce managers need visibility on product inventory level, popular sales, and customer browsing behaviour.

Each instance requires a different set of customer data attributes to meet the specific use case. It’s simply not feasible to ingest and analyse all customer data for any context.

To become truly customer-centric — that is to make business decisions with customers’ interest at the core — brands need to surface the necessary customer insights to fit the context, in real-time, for specific use cases.

Context is everything 

Contrary to popular belief, we don’t need to know everything about the customer, we only need to know what’s relevant to have a positive impact on profitability and sustainable growth.

Sergey Krayniy, head of product development for SAP Customer Data solutions, says contextual profile views will be a key for CX success: “For real-time engagement, software solutions need to be agile. They’re simply not agile if they’re required to analyse massive amounts of data at every turn. Instead, today’s CDP solutions do the hard work of unifying the data, analysing it, and surfacing the relevant insights based on use cases.”

The solution that brands need today emphasises data unification and holistic profile creation, but also goes beyond marketing use cases. This customer data layer must serve as a foundation that also can fuel commerce, sales, and service interactions with insights and rich customer context.

The result is a next-generation customer data strategy, one that emphasises integration with engagement systems across the organisation to deliver the needed customer insights and context.

With benefits ranging from improved customer satisfaction to less IT resource strain, this fresh approach may finally end the dominance of the 360-degree customer concept once and for all.
 

Customers first. Engagement, loyalty, and long-term trust follows. Watch our interactive CDP demo.