in this issue
It’s Time to Harness the Power of the 360° Customer Profile
How investing in 360° customer profiles can improve customer retention and reduce churn
by Tony Ayaz, CEO and Board Member, Scuba Analytics
In a post-digital transformation era, there’s no going back. No going back to traditional business intelligence (BI) tools. No going back to exploring static data. And no going back to stale customer insights.
Instead, brands must have better tools and strategies in place to keep up with real-time customer demands, dubbed “customer now.” While the shift to CX is not new, how brands approach it requires a deeper level of granularity of customer behavior and data — all of which are critical in attracting and retaining customers.
But what does that evolution look like, and what does it require from brands? How can brands take CX to the next level?
A recent Forbes report found that 96% of customers consider CX important to brand loyalty, and 84% of brands that prioritize CX reported increased revenue. The bad news is that, unlike horseshoes and hand grenades, “close” isn’t good enough when it comes to understanding your customers.
To increase customer retention, brands need holistic, persistently updated customer profiles borne of extensive identity resolution processes. Whether you stitch together data insights
with reverse IP, identity resolution, or CDPs, brands need profiles that are comprehensive, predictive, and easily digestible by all departments across an organization.
In other words, your brand needs 360° customer profiles.
A 360° View of the Customer
A 360° customer profile consists of all of your customer’s information aggregated into one place and analyzed for actionable insights. Some of the information necessary for a comprehensive 360° profile include:
- Demographic: Who is your customer? How old are they? What is their income?
- Geographic: Where does your customer live? What is their housing situation? What time zone are they in? Are they in an urban, suburban, or rural area?
- Communication preferences: Which channels are you most likely to reach your customers in? What marketing campaigns do they respond to? What are their interactions with your website and across other channels like email, social media, paid advertising, and IoT devices?
- Customer history: What are the customer’s purchase history and product usage? What other interactions and digital touchpoints has a customer had with your brand or across their connected IoT devices?
- Brand perception: Does the customer feel the brand aligns with their values? Have they completed brand surveys or left feedback? Are they sharing your web pages and content? Do they recommend your product or brand? And if so, how does it impact your brand?
- Needs: Does the customer require premium services? Are prices too high for a customer to engage? Are there any patterns correlated to their needs (seasonal or otherwise)?
- Loyalty: How often does the customer engage with your brand? How long have they been a customer? Do they purchase numerous products and services from your brand, or have one area of focus and needs? Have they referred your brand to friends or family?
Once aggregated, this data paints a holistic portrait of a customer’s past, present, and likely future — all easily viewed under a single pane of glass.
An Uphill Battle Without a 360° View
A recent Gartner study revealed a startling contradiction: although 82% of organizations aspire to build 360° customer profiles, only 14% of organizations have achieved this.
Although brands may be intimidated by such a daunting task, falling behind the competition will cost brands in the long-run. Some CX challenges without a 360° customer profile include:
- Poor data quality: Organizations compiling customer information across multiple disparate systems may be inadvertently sullying their data. For example, a name could be spelled multiple ways, a customer could have multiple emails, or a street address may or may not be abbreviated. Although small errors may seem benign, poor data can seriously corrode customer trust. A recent study found that 72% of organizations believed poor data negatively affected customer engagement and satisfaction. Do you believe poor data quality has affected your customers?
- Limited omnichannel communication: Omnichannel communication only works if customer data is formatted and managed consistently across your entire organization. Individual teams utilizing different systems could cause embarrassing — and potentially damaging — oversights, such as marketing and customer service teams engaging the same customer at the same time or providing a discount code after they’ve already checked out. How aligned are your omnichannel efforts?
- Missed opportunities: Limited customer profile views equate to limited opportunities. Consider a recent Gartner study, which found that 26% of respondents were overwhelmed by marketing emails — and 15% of respondents found them annoying. For those brands, a 360° customer profile could have flagged customer discontent or low email engagement before it negatively impacted their brand perception. Can your brand afford to annoy your customers?
Benefits of 360° Customer Profiles Brands Can’t Afford to Ignore
A customer’s digital touchpoints and footprints help complete the larger puzzle of their profile. Having missing pieces to that puzzle can be challenging in more ways than one, as mentioned above. But, when pieced together correctly, the completed puzzle of a customer’s profile gives your brand unparalleled insights.
The benefits of 360° customer profiles speak for themselves:
- Intuitive access: 360° degree customer profiles are intuitive by design. Every team in your organization, regardless of technical expertise, can better understand your customers. By removing silos across teams, everyone in your company can have a clear understanding of the customer — and leverage that information to improve product features, marketing strategies, or improved customer service efforts.
- More accurate data: Eliminating duplicate and incorrect data allows for more accurate data-driven insights. For example, when used alongside a behavioral analytics platform, profiles can unify all of a customer’s email addresses to reduce duplicate contacts, and better track a customer’s activity and journeys. With more sophisticated data, brands can feel confident in their decisions when buoyed by 360° customer profiles.
- Truly comprehensive: The sum of the whole is greater than individual parts. By having all your customer’s information in a single view, brands can correlate otherwise disparate information into actionable insights.
- Enhanced personalization: Customer loyalty is earned, not given. By learning more about their customers, brands can take data-driven actions to improve customer relations and drive retention. More often than not, thoughtful and data-backed personalization can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty, and drive profits.
- Improved bottom line and ROI: The best customers are repeat customers. Just by retaining 5% more customers each year, brands could see up to 95% in profits. A 360° customer profile ensures your brand is doing everything it can to keep customers engaged, loyal, and happy throughout the entire customer lifecycle.
How to Build a 360° Customer Profile
The idea of crafting an all-encompassing customer profile may seem daunting at first. But there are clear, actionable steps brands can take to successfully build a 360° customer profile.
- Define your scope: This common obstacle for early 360° customer profile development is “scope creep,” or when vaguely defined parameters become
too large to practically execute. Before investing in 360° customer profiles, brands should take a moment to clearly define which KPIs and customer data they want to track. Brands may want to know everything about their customers, but should start with tangible goals. - Perform a data audit: Insights gleaned from customer profiles won’t carry much weight if the data behind them is inaccurate. A data audit can help clean and organize your data by reformatting all data into a consistent view, accessible by all teams. Since this can be time-consuming, many organizations use tools to help simplify and automate the ETL process.
- Leverage real-time analytics: Any time a customer interacts with your brand, that information should be recorded and shared within a platform used by the whole company, regardless of team. By juxtaposing seemingly isolated data points into a single view, your brand is much more likely to discover customer behavior patterns. A tool like Scuba, for example, offers real-time behavioral analytics on the fly — all while unifying your customer data.
- Supplement existing data: Just because the profile is finished doesn’t mean your work is. Brands must continue to refine and contextualize their data by supplementing it with additional research, such as tracking customers’ social media usage or collecting customer feedback through surveys. This supplemental data can also be used to identify blind spots and further improve engagement. Analytics tools should be able to accommodate the scale of data points, and shouldn’t limit your time to insights —which is where real-time analytics can help.
As your customer profiles become more comprehensive, your analytics may struggle to keep up. Brands need real-time analytics to capture and track customer activity as it happens, which will increase time-to-insights. When Salesforce introduced real-time data management to their marketing times, their ROI increased by 28%.
Elevate Your 360° Customer Profiles With Scuba
Creating a truly 360° customer profile is easier said than done. With endless touchpoints across a vast digital landscape, it can be challenging to capture activity and accurately develop profiles.
That’s where Scuba Analytics can help. Brands like Comcast have been able to harness the power of Scuba to improve their analytics and truly build 360° customer profiles. With Scuba, Comcast ingests billions of events from over 70 channels of data each month, giving them real-time, 360° visibility into customer insights.
Scuba’s real-time continuous intelligence platform integrates with existing CDP and CRM software and elevates your 360° profiles even higher by optimizing resolution processes and increasing insight speed.
By allowing Scuba to do the heavy lifting, your brand can focus on what matters: improving customer service, driving revenue, and reducing churn.
Want to learn more about how to elevate your 360° customer profiles? Request a demo today or talk to a Scuba expert.
Tony Ayaz |
About the Author:Tony has over twenty years of experience as a founder and executive focused on data analytics and platforms across APM, SIEMs and Business Intelligence. Tony has extensive experience in the execution of GTM strategies globally, early-stage investing, and scaling companies toward IPO.
Learn more at scuba.io |
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