Modern world retailers know why customer experience is important for their business. They understand that delivering the best customer experience can give them a competitive edge in the market. Today, customers have high expectations due to the endless options available. Their demands and requirements can be met instantly. What makes it easy for retailers to achieve useful insights to their target demographics and deliver what they demand?
It is possible by having a comprehensive understanding of consumer behavior and market trends.
The 360 degree view of each customer is shortly known as Customer 360 which enables retailers to use data along with digital technologies to make better business decisions. The concept of Customer 360 can be used with targeted initiatives that use the solutions developed by retail digital transformation.
The Concept of Customer 360
Customer 360 is an idea with which companies are able to fetch a complete view of customers by gathering data from several points which are used by customer to interact with the company to buy products and services and get support.
The modern retail industry is omnichannel since it has numerous points where retailers and customers get in touch with each other. Across social media, e-commerce, in-store, and mobile apps; customers are continuously purchasing products, liking and saving the products and this data is later used by retailers.
Even when the digital technologies were absent in earlier times, retailers were still looking for customer 360. This modern customer 360 view is about accumulating each data and detail of the customer in customer profile with the help of AI and analytics systems. This enhances personalized service, customer service, and retail operations of the company. With the right practice, customer 360 can bring successful outcomes and more revenue.
Customer 360 is the customer intelligence technology that is used to understand customers by analyzing their buying patterns and their motivations to gain business growth.
Modern customer is well-informed. Today, people can have unlimited access to information about a specific brand and its offers. Such customers are more demanding and less loyal. If they are unhappy with the service or product, they will give their feedback and expect your response in return. It is important to consider the angry customer if you don’t want any PR disaster.
With digital technologies like AI, big data, and machine learning and IoT, retailers have bulk amount of data that they can’t even handle. Every customer is generating more and more data with passing time, this benefits the retailers as they get a complete profile. The issue with the bulk data is that it has to be processed for better use.
There are certain metrics that can be gathered and used by a retail CRM system to get the idea of how much data is handled by retailers-
- Demographics – It has age, name, address, occupation, contact details, etc.
- Family details – Partner details, children, anniversaries
- Social Media – All social platforms, likes, shares, posts
- Store information – Frequent purchases, most liked stores
- Behaviors – purchase trends, purchase triggers
- Marketing intel – predicted lifetime value, average transaction, etc.
How to apply Customer 360 to business operations?
Retailers must ensure that all data is collected and can be accessed by a single data analytics system in order to use data to get a 360 degree customer view. In the traditional era, there were disparate systems in which data was silo. Such data delivered inaccurate insights and limited customer view.
When retailers own a comprehensive data system that functions to collect and analyze data, they are able to build complete customer profiles and achieve a 360 degree customer view. Since then it became critical to deploy digital solutions – machine learning, data analytics, AI, and a comprehensive retail CRM to create a holistic customer profile and boost customer engagement.
When the customer profiles are created, retailers can gather extra data using interaction details. Dynamics 365 partners are intended to create a campaign performance dashboard that enables retailers to find how campaigns landed with distinct stores.
Customer 360 allows retailers to optimize customer engagement, which enables-
- Enhanced customer interaction
- New upsell/cross-sell opportunities
- Better and effective marketing campaigns
- More optimized customer strategies