We have often noticed that reviews, testimonials, and endorsements significantly influence today’s customers, so much so, that almost 85% of the people tend to have a look at online reviews before making a purchase, while 63% prefer to shop from the site having user reviews, the local consumer review survey, conducted by Brightlocal, says. This increase in endorsement sort of marketing is called influencer marketing and this buzzword is showing a 325 percent increase in searches in the last three years on Google alone.
Marketing leaders have acknowledged that influencer marketing makes one of the fastest emerging online customer-acquisition strategies. So, the link between marketing and positive endorsements has always been related to customer experience. The better the customer feels about a product/business, the more likely they are to bring referrals to it. This is just one of the hundreds of examples showing that today’s customers seek for personalization and want businesses to know more about them to provide more value. And that’s where the 360-degree customer view and profiles, especially in terms of analytical perspectives, come into play.

The MDM 360-Degree Customer View – What is it?

The master data management 360-degree customer view is the foundation of how the businesses make an experiential relationship with their customers. The key to long-lasting customer relationship is knowing your customers more closely and precisely and providing them the products and services more appealing to and useful for them.

The master data management 360-degree customer view forms an understanding of the companies to have a comprehensive view of their customers by leveraging the valuable data coming to the business through multiple touchpoints in a customer’s journey.

However, having MDM 360-degree customer view needs all hands on the deck. Businesses first must realize the need for developing customer-facing teams and begin tracking unstructured and structured data. Then everyone, right from the marketing to sales to customer services, must recognize the stake in gathering, analyzing, responding and using the data. Gartner reveals that only 10 percent of the businesses have MDM 360-degree customer view and just 5 percent use it to systemically expand their business.

What Does this View Show?

The MDM 360-degree customer view is like a crystal ball, showing you the past, present and the future of the relationship between a customer and the brand.

• The Past

Through MDM 360-degree customer view, you can see how the customers have been interacting with the products and services. Businesses can see their history and explore easily digested and meaningful facts about their customers including product/service quality & activity, interaction across all the channels, latest product views, campaign activity, and process history.

• The present

When the customer approaches, irrespective of the channel or touchpoint used, the business must know what’s happening in their account and within their phase of the buying cycle. Being up to pace on present customers’ behavior implies that businesses need to have a track of following customer information:

• Who are these customers?
• How do they relate to the business/brand?
• What is their context of interaction?
• Is there any current issue or recent order recorded that the customer service should know about?

• The Future

By understanding the customer behaviors this way; (past and present), the businesses can infer valuable findings and map a future customer relationship strategy. Using big data analytics and digital intelligence, it is simply possible to know if there are cross-sell or upsell opportunities; for example, are the customers intrigued by retargeting or cookies? What kind of content/ads do they most concerned about?

By evaluating the customers’ past and present, the sellers and the marketers can forecast the future buying behaviors and develop a plan that effectively addresses the queries and pain points.

The MDM 360-Degree View – Why?

By analyzing and recognizing these phases of customers, a business can offer a more customized experience. We recommend 36-degree customer view due to:

• Customer alignment

Creating long-lasting customer relationships is crucial for the business. Using intelligent and dynamic customer relationship management (CRM) systems, various departments across the company can share accurate, meaningful data about the customer, irrespective of the channel used. The seamless data sharing leads to the least number of errors in customer interactions since it helps each department to get aligned with external and internal goals.

• Predictive Analysis

By gathering various pieces of a customer journey, a business gets a clear picture of the way customers may act. Hence, they can know:

• What do these patterns about the customers tell regarding their probability to buy something?
• Do they show increased dissatisfaction at any time in their buying journey that might lead to churn?
• What are the causes of cart abandonment?

• Customer Intelligence & Loyalty

The more detailed a data collection process is, the more refined persona planning becomes. Behavioral information, aside from demographic knowledge, is important for exploring the wider trends and user response. Businesses should think about the data that provide customers insight. They should also look beyond the analytics to include feedback from the customer service personnel and anecdotal data.

As per one of the recent customer reports, the customer experience is going to overtake the product and the price as the key brand differentiator by 2020. Also, a customer will be 4 times more likely to purchase from the competitor if the issue is service-based, versus product or price-based.

• Cost Reduction

Marketing campaigns falling flat are highly expensive. The more data-driven and intelligent these campaigns are, the more successful they are going to be. Businesses must develop their customer outreach as well as the upsell opportunities targeted to avoid allocating funds to the campaigns that don’t perform.

For improved visibility into their customers, businesses should also segment them. A master data management 360-degree customer view gives businesses an opportunity to tackle the low-value customers differently.

The MDM 360-Degree Customer View – How?

You can better define customers by their behaviors than demographics. So, how are you going to blend customer data for a more comprehensive look? Here is how MDM 360-degree view enables it:

• Social tools

One of the simplest, most economical and effective means to explore customer behavior is social media. Social data is totally unfiltered, providing info about the sociological aspects of the customers. Businesses can understand customers’ sentiments and the way they change with the changing trends.

• Data Overlap

Whether it is through an app or social media or comments on social media, data analysts can mine the data to analyze the results.

• Data Audit

The valuable insights that are both accurate and relevant, can only be achieved from high-quality data. Keeping the data organized and cleaned is vital to deliver on it. For this, businesses must execute a process where all departments are required to enter data in a consistent format to enable easier data communication across the departments. For proper customer segmentation, businesses can pursue a process called categorization, during data sharing, it is easy to lose the reference of what the data is reflecting. Use categories to make sure that relationships with other objects are the same.

The data is of no use if you cannot properly segment the customer silos and will obstruct you from making valuable customer observations and 360-degree customer view. The takeaway here is that start small by determining the use cases and developing on them with the evolution of your data and analytical ability.

BBI Consultancy is a digital transformation consulting firm that offers Enterprise Data Management solutions, Digital transformation solutions, data protection solutions, big data services and more. join the digital revolution, get in touch with us. We are based in multiple locations across the globe, including Egypt, UAE and KSA.