What is a 360-degree view of a customer?

A 360-degree view of a customer is a comprehensive, unified profile that consolidates all available data and interactions a company has with an individual customer across every touchpoint and channel. A single source of truth, it’s used to better understand customer behavior, preferences, purchase history, and needs, enabling brands to provide a more personalized service and deliver tailored marketing campaigns.

To deliver hyper-personalized customer experiences with relevant content and messaging, marketers need to understand customer needs and behaviors. A single data point, such as entry channel or campaign, won’t cut it. Personalization requires robust engagement data that gives actionable insight into who customers are and what they’re interested in. Marketers often refer to this understanding as having a 360-degree view of a customer, meaning they can see and act on the customer’s entire history of interactions with your brand — past and present. As organizations strive to achieve this 360-degree view of the customer, it’s important to understand what that really means, the benefits you can expect to gain when seeing the customer relationship from all points in the customer journey, and how to go about removing data silos and connecting disparate systems to successfully achieve a 360-degree view of your customers.

There’s no question—seeing a customer from all angles enables brands to optimize their marketing strategies. But it’s also essential to look at the value this 360-degree view can provide from an ROI perspective. What’s the value to your organization of increasing efficiency, lowering costs, and gaining a better understanding of customer trends? Let’s take a closer look at the potential business benefits, when you execute well on a 360-degree strategy:

There are various ways companies approach data collection, including collecting explicit data from forms, tracking website visits and purchases, or gathering unstructured data, like contextual information from social media platforms. While there are different ways to achieve a complete customer profile, the most important thing to note is the need to aggregate this data in a centralized location. The more relevant data you have in one place, the easier it is to understand an individual customer’s behavior and deliver personalization to meet their specific needs. This is where efficient customer data management becomes crucial.

Once you have a complete picture of the available customer information, the next step is to ensure it is accessible to all relevant departments throughout the company. This way, anyone who interacts with the customer will understand what’s happened already and how the customer likely feels about the current situation.

What exactly is the difference between structured data and unstructured data, and why do you need to understand these classifications?

Structured data includes information that can easily be placed in predefined fields such as age, contact information, and numerical ratings.

Unstructured data doesn't fit neatly into the rows and columns of a spreadsheet, but it does offer critical details for understanding the customer. Examples of unstructured data include social media insights, Voice of Customer (VoC) research, and email correspondence.

It’s critical to capture and analyze both types of data to understand not only the facts of a customer interaction but also the sentiment and emotion behind engagement.

When you’ve identified a single view vision as a top priority, you’ll want to consider the technology and business factors that make for a successful execution. Let’s look at the technology piece first.

Your mission is to gather all available data—structured and unstructured, current and historical — into one central place, and then establish a process to capture, analyze, and respond in real time to the various channels of communication. It’s critical to layer in the contextual or unstructured data that’s extracted from social, voice, and digital channels so you get a complete picture of the situation. Easier said than done?

An intelligent customer data platform (CDP) that combines customer data, analytics, and marketing automation capabilities is an efficient way to meet the technology demands of your 360-degree strategy. With advanced customer segmentation, you can create highly targeted customer cohorts to activate across any channel, instantly. Meanwhile, seamless data integration allows you to ingest all your historical and contextual customer data from across your ecosystem via interactive APIs. Modern SaaS customer data platforms typically offer flexible architecture and seamless API integrations.

Whatever solution you choose, make sure it will empower your team by providing collaborative, flexible, and agile capabilities that enhance business processes and workflows.

Many companies in the Sitecore community have used personalization solutions to successfully execute on their customer strategies. For example, United Airlines partnered with Americaneagle.com to migrate its existing Sitecore DXP solution to a composable and headless cloud environment incorporating Sitecore XM Cloud, Sitecore CDP, and Sitecore Personalize, delivered through Vercel. Enhancements to personalization and multilingual support have transformed the airport experience for United Airlines’ customers, with 82% of non-English speaking customers saying that the improvements have made the traveling experience easier. These positive changes have increased passenger trust in United Airlines, resulting in better travel experiences and more efficient operations.

Similarly, electrical product manufacturer and distributor NHP is enhancing personalization and streamlining marketing operations using Sitecore CDP and Sitecore Personalize. With Sitecore Personalize, NHP can deliver tailored online experiences and run targeted campaigns for different audiences simultaneously. With Sitecore CDP, NHP can capture insights into online customer behaviour, such as an interest in a new product, and pass them on to sales reps to help them start meaningful conversations.

When marketers have a 360-degree view of their customers, they can deliver truly personalized experiences that drive revenue and strengthen customer loyalty. It all comes down to knowing what’s happened in the past, what pain points and motivations the customer is feeling now, and where you want the relationship to go in the future.

For many organizations, starting a 360-degree project can open the door to a full digital transformation. The definitive guide to digital transformation covers everything you need to know to launch a digital transformation initiative.