The importance of customer and shopper insight to drive sales, marketing and operational strategy is clear, but this becomes even more valuable when you have a full 360° single customer view.

For companies today, more channels and data sources represent both significant opportunities and challenges to understand what is happening internally within the business. The more a company knows about its customer and prospects, the more effective it will be in communicating with them. For this reason, having a complete view of all your customer data both in terms of touch points and transactional interactions is essential. If you can pull this together into one central point for analysis, this provides a valuable 360° customer view. This single customer view pulls together all your customer intelligence so you are not analysing disparate customer data sources and interactions which could skew your insight.

Benefits of a 360° Single Customer View

Brands & Retailers have a significant challenge; acquiring, engaging and retaining customers in today’s marketplace with strong competition and the existence of consumer power. To keep ahead of the competition and in sync with customers’ needs and expectations, it is essential that companies have a better understanding of their customers.The need to achieve a single customer view is more challenging than ever due to the volume of data available from multiple touch points both on and offline used by consumers.

It is worth pointing out at this point, that having a wealth of data is only valuable if you can unlock the potential insight contained within it. Companies need to be able to understand how they can convert this knowledge to drive meaningful action. You are not alone if the mass of data available is bogging you down or inhibiting your ability to analyse and filter out useful intelligence. Having multi-channel marketing and touch points is important to reach and engage with your audience but can leave you with masses of data to interpret but no clear objective in mind.

Customer Insight

A good understanding of your customer will provide information on who they are, where they live, their lifestyle choices, behaviours and aspirations.  This knowledge will in turn allow you to engage with your audience with relevant and timely communications in a manner that is preferred.

If you have all your customer data in one central place you can start to analyse your most profitable customers, size the market opportunity available and look for growth opportunities.

Benefits of A Single Customer View

A single customer view pulls together all your disparate data sources – marketing, transactional, operational (on & offline) in one central place so that you can gain a picture of WHY your customers are interacting with you, HOW OFTEN they engage, which CHANNELS they use. Furthermore additional marketing insight into who purchased online or in store, which sales converted through email or SMS, who opens and engages through which offers, promotions and discounts.

Understanding how your customers interact with you, what motivates them to purchase, how long the sales cycle takes, is important to develop an effective sales & marketing strategy. This should reflect the promotions, communications, merchandising and pricing is in line with your customer’s behaviour and needs.  your database holds the key to who your customers are, what they are purchasing, how they prefer to engage with you (which channels) and where your next sales opportunities are. When you look at a 360° view of your customers you can decide which customers would be receptive to specific promotions. It will also help identify those customers that need nurturing, those that are high value and need protecting and those that may be unprofitable to engage with.  This insight into your business should enable you to target your investment on the elements of the marketing mix and media channels that lead to sales and therefore will lead to brand growth and enhanced relationships with consumers.

A 360° single customer view provides accurate customer insight and intelligence which can be used to adapt and change your strategy to suit changes in market trends and more importantly how your customers are behaving and spending.

For customer analysis projects please contact our customer insights team for help and guidance