Customer 360 — An analytical approach
Data has become more pervasive than ever; with the decentralization of budgets to business owners, the departments often go their way to create/procure data sources that help their immediate remit. In most cases, such initiatives solve a particular use case within organizations.
Starting with a use case is an absolute first, and the budget in hand offers agility for a quicker implementation, action, and ROI.
The challenge with the approach is that it creates short-term winners and long-term overheads — where every team is looking for a compartmentalized winning formula while not looking at a holistic organization-wide strategy.
The data created/procured is helpful for the use case; however, it isn’t directly replicable for other business use cases. The desire to move at speed results in data and processes that are less standardized, and it involves massive costs and time to reuse the available information.
This call for a need to have a data strategy that is integrated and governs these data sources/remits in a structured way enabling account teams and improving customer experience.
Customer 360 (or Client 360 or Customer 3D / 4π) is an approach through which organizations can see their engagement with a customer and evaluate performance through an organizational and customer lens.
Customer 360 aims to harness various engagement parameters with the customer from inside-out and outside-in perspectives. It looks at the entire customer life cycle, i.e., the internal and external ecosystems, to help the account teams build effective engagement strategies.
An example of an internal life cycle element could be a customer’s movement from a lead (though various conversation stages) to an opportunity, successfully manifesting into bookings, serving of contract, and associated billing. All these elements have independent sub-lifecycles, and reading them as a cohesive story would help us make smarter at each engagement step. For example — a fresh lead with a history of association with an existing opportunity (closed), the buying group could help warm the lead better, improving the chances of a successful conversation.
Similarly, there are various external data points available. Harnessing information available in annual reports — current and historical, revenue and employee trends, capital and operational expenditure, business strategy, M&A, divestitures, spin/split-offs; layered on top of internal information makes it a very powerful tool to initiate customer conversations. Reading customers’ social and digital signals add the cherry on top.
But why is it challenging to build a real Customer 360? I have tried to pinpoint five significant challenges in building Customer 360.
1. Use-cases
2. Trust
3. Lack of business analysts/data understanding
4. Patience
5. Lack of storytellers
- Use Cases
It is often a chicken and egg story. One of the primary root causes for this limbo is — business users can’t appreciate data and vice-versa for the data teams. The use cases are hard to come by, and in such a scenario, the data teams become subservient to business direction, producing mediocre results at best.
2. Lack of “Business Analysts”
Various training programs and self-serve platforms claim to resurrect the hidden data scientist within ourselves (as if some demons are holding it). Some offer to generate this skillset in weeks, some are elaborate courses, and some claim to do magic within hours.
The lines are also blurry between a data analyst, a business analyst, and a data scientist. In a mature organization, one can visualize these roles as running a relay race, where each member must run some part of the other person’s scope of race.
Business analysts hone the capability of looking at data through a business lens. They not only work with the business teams to identify (potential) use cases but also work with the data analysts/scientists to bring the use case to life. They are masters of prototyping a business solution (or outcome).
3. Patience
When MRR/DRRs are becoming key lagging indicators for business performance (as against quarterly), patience as a resource is not available aplenty. Business managers often look for the closest, most visible outcome. Consistent long-term data strategies are often complex and tenuous and take many mini failures before delivering a revered success.
4. Lack of storytellers
Storytellers, who! Storytellers are blue-sky thinkers with a pinch of realism in their stories. They connect various business functions into a singular cohesive business outcome. They are experienced business leaders with demonstrated success in delivering business outcomes using the power of data. Storytellers become the ambassadors for any organization-wide data integration program offering vision, experience, and working as a conduit across functions.
5. Trust
Could I make this my point number 1? We’ve become a data-centric world, creating and leveraging data simultaneously. We all love data; however, we love “our” data. Our single version of the truth could fundamentally differ from another version, often leading to data debates rather than business outcomes and performance discussions.
This siloed approach not only hampers decision-making but also stifles the free sharing of data and information within the organization.
We should see Customer 360 as a concept that helps connect critical aspects of customer life-cycle and help organizations improve Customer Experience and Employee Experience, optimizing Selling.
To deliver a successful Customer 360, the organizations need organizational and Executive backing, an approach and willingness to solve the five challenges, and a lot of Grit, Guts, and Gumption!
