Editor’s Note: Redpoint Global recently connected with Ed Scrivani, Chief Operating Officer at Munvo, to discuss why organizations should be interested in developing a Customer 360. Ed touched on some key considerations and challenges in building a Customer 360, the steps to take, and some tangible use cases. This is an edited version of the conversation, which you can watch here.
Q: Ed, thanks for joining us today to discuss the importance of having a Customer 360. Can you touch on the basics of what it is and what it consists of for those unfamiliar?
A: Absolutely, and first off, thanks for having me. The ultimate purpose of a Customer 360 is to provide a comprehensive view of customers by consolidating data from various sources. It is a hyper-clean set of profile records – all that is known or knowable about each customer – and this set of records is made available to business users across the enterprise to create an audience and to activate messages across all devices, channels, and touchpoints.
Q: What does the Customer 360 consist of?
A: There are essentially four key components. The first is the profile, consisting of centralized customer data – demographics, purchase information, interactions, preferences, and behavioral data. Second is the data sources, which integrate various data sources such as CRM systems, a marketing database, social media, support tickets, and an EHR in healthcare – anywhere customer data is stored. There should be an ETL process to ensure consistency and accuracy of the incoming data, which can also be in any format: batch, streaming, structured, unstructured, etc.
Next, attention must be given to data quality. To ensure the accuracy and completeness of a customer profile, processes must be in place for deduplication and standardizations and for creating persistent identity keys at the individual, household, address, or entity level – whether an individual customer, a business, product, etc. With persistent keys, a profile may then be enriched by creating and attaching data aggregates related to recency, frequency, monetary value, and other signals that provide layers of context to the profile.
The final component is analytics and insight – how to drive meaningful insight from the Customer 360. That could involve predictive analytics, segmentation, lifetime value analysis, sentiment analysis – anything that brings the Customer 360 to life for the intended business purpose. Most importantly, the analytics should all be automated with minimal latency from data ingestion through activation and at the enterprise scale.
Q: How will a Customer 360 help an organization increase revenue and reduce costs?
A: Right away, you’re removing duplicates within and between dozens of data siloes, which both cuts the expense of duplicate marketing efforts while also boosting responses and conversions by communicating the right message to the right person at the right time and on the right channel. And that personalized customer experience – the activation of the Customer 360 that demonstrates an understanding of the customer – leads to increased customer loyalty, higher lifetime value, increased spend, improved customer satisfaction, and higher retention. There are countless benefits from delivering tailored recommendations and offers based on past behaviors or effectively addressing a customer’s preferences.
Q: What are the steps for creating a Customer 360?
A: There are a few key steps. First is to define the objective and scope, the goal for having a Customer 360. It’s essential to know the depth of the customer understanding that is going to be required for your intended use cases. The second is to assemble the right team, consisting of IT, data specialists, marketing, sales, and maybe even customer service. There should be a shared understanding of what a successful creation and utilization of a Customer 360 will look like. In that same vein, having an executive sponsor is vital to keep everyone on the same page.
When you’re ready to create the Customer 360, the following steps are to identify the data sources to be integrated, what analytics will be in play, what testing processes will consist of, and what mechanisms will be in place to ensure continual maintenance and improvement.
The common thread throughout the creation of the Customer 360 is data quality. It’s important to ensure data quality is in place at every step. Global address standardization, email normalization, phone verification, parsing, and other routine data quality steps will ensure the trustworthiness of the customer profile. It is also important that these fundamental data hygiene routines are run lights-out 24/7. Similarly, there must be security, compliance and governance protocols in place throughout the creation of the Customer 360.
Lastly, things to watch out for include an awareness to bake in some time for user adoption and training. These are new tools and processes; users should know how to extract meaningful insights. A Customer 360 becomes far more valuable when users trust it will solve real-world problems.
Q: To that point, what do you see as some of the more profitable use cases?
That depends on what industry you’re in. I’ll touch on a few. In telecommunications, a Customer 360 offers tremendous potential for driving profitability through improved services and an enhanced CX. By utilizing insights from Customer 360, telcos can tailor personalized offers and plans based on usage patterns, preferences and other customer behaviors. Using Customer 360 to create more granular segments, they can execute more personalized marketing campaigns to capitalize on cross-sell and upsell opportunities. By equipping support teams with Customer 360 profiles, telcos can improve issue resolution, leading to higher customer satisfaction and lower support costs.
In healthcare, an actionable Customer 360 can be used to enhance patient care, improve operational efficiencies and drive better health outcomes. By centralizing and analyzing data from CRM systems, EHRs, labs and other sources, healthcare organizations can communicate with a patient with a single, consistent voice across all interactions and channels. That might entail personalized treatment plans, reducing care gaps, improving response rates, and helping patients make and keep more appointments.
Ed Scrivani is the Chief Operating Officer at Munvo, responsible for professional services, sales and software products. A marketing software system integrator, Munvo provides expert consulting services and software solutions, delivering Implementation, Marketing Transformation, Data & Analytics, and Marketing Operations services in North America and across the globe to enable organizations to make data-driven decisions, enhance customer experiences and maximize MarTech investments.
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