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Today, data is the center of everything. Therefore, it’s only natural for organizations to leverage it to create a data-centric customer strategy that aims to optimize sales and marketing processes.

Every customer action, ranging from the first touchpoint to the purchase, creates a digital footprint. These interactions can be in the form of an email, social media engagement, landing page visit, or even in-person contact. Usually, this information is recorded in disparate systems across business units, with departments working in silos, unaware of the customer interactions happening elsewhere.

To get intelligible insights from their information, businesses need to aggregate, clean, and organize scattered customer data to create a holistic view. Organizations can further utilize it to develop customer-focused marketing and sales strategies that translate to better ROI.

Obtaining Value from Customer Data

Data silos exist in a plethora of places — the challenge is in bringing these isolated structures together and combining them regardless of their formats, structures, and data types.

This is where a data integration tool enters the picture. It can extract information from these sources, clean and filter them according to your requirements, and consolidate them to generate actionable insights and create a 360-degree customer view.

Some of the sources that are essential to creating a holistic customer view include:

• Internal Enterprise Systems: CRM, marketing automation platforms, and customer support software all capture diverse touchpoints between your customers and the company. Each interaction contains different cues about your prospects, which, when integrated with other sources, can deliver insights about your product/service, quality of lead magnets, attention-retention time, etc.
• Social Networks and Analytics: This data can help you understand the level of engagement with your customers. In addition, it can provide you pertinent information about your customer demographics so you can identify your target audience and cater to them through customized campaigns.
• Transactional Databases: Information related to purchase details, average order value, referral programs, subscription details, etc. can help you uncover basic patterns of the customer journey.

An integration tool that combines all this information and presents it in a user-friendly format can help you reach insights faster.

How a Unified Customer View Can Elevate Organization Growth

Gartner’s analyst report deduced that only 5 percent of companies use a 360-degree customer view to grow their business systematically. Here’s how these companies are staying ahead of the curve and bringing massive value to their business processes.

In-Depth Customer Intelligence

Comprehensive customer data provides deep insight into customer behavior, priorities, demographics, buying trends, and more. Marketers can utilize this information in persona planning and optimize their buying journey through targeted marketing strategies.

For example, a 360-degree view of the patient data can help healthcare providers understand a patient’s medical history, frequency of doctor visits, habits, and behaviors, and contribute to better healthcare plans.

Better Cost Management

Marketing campaigns that fall flat can leave a hefty dent in the company budget. With enhanced customer visibility, you can segment your audience based on the results of your campaigns. This way, you can allocate different budgets to campaigns targeting return customers vs. prospects who never made a purchase.

Furthermore, you can devise new strategies to attract new customers or upsell opportunities to the existing ones and cut costs on the campaigns that don’t perform well based on this holistic data.

Data-driven campaigns have more chances of success and are therefore more effective in the long-term for cost management.

Build A Loyal Customer Base

Landing a customer is great, but what’s equally important is to make them return. To achieve that, you need to know your customers and anticipate their requirements to bridge the gap between demand and purchase. Tailoring your messaging to suit their preferences will improve their customer experience and give them an incentive to come back for more.

Customer loyalty is expected to exceed product and price as the key brand differentiator in 2020. Organizations that can use their data to appeal to their customers’ needs are likely to stay in profitable business.

Businesses need trusted data to back up their decision-making. A 360-degree customer view enables an organization to understand and analyze different facets of customer data and grow customer base, retain profitable business, and bring value to front-facing functions.