360 Degree Customer View: What, Why, & How with Benefits

A 360 degree customer view aka single customer view is a representation of customer data managed by an organization capturing all the interactions of customers with the organization and use It to deliver personalized and targeted campaigns to close more deals and generate more revenue.

That’s a big problem when you look at the overall productivity of a team, especially salespeople. 

They already have so many restrictions. They must follow time zones, face compliances, and prospects are never ready to talk! 

It’s painful if your sales reps are wasting an entire day per week looking for information they already have! 

That’s where CRM software comes in with a 360 view of the customer.  

It not only saves you an enormous amount of time. But it surely saves you a few clicks when your rep looks for information – because everything is on one screen!  

In this article, we’ll learn the 360 view of the customer and how it can help multiple teams, not just sales.  

Let’s get started!

What is 360 degree view of the customer?

360 view of customer is one of the functions of CRM software. This lets your reps access the complete details, conversations, and files related to a particular client or deal on one page.   

In layperson’s terms, the 360° customer view provides a complete understanding of the customer’s overall psyche by obtaining a comprehensive view of customers.  

This is done quickly by leveraging data collected from various touchpoints in a customer’s journey.  

The 360-degree view of customers also often requires a big data analytics strategy to merge and manage structured customer data.  

Organizations must first commit to developing customer-facing teams and start tracking structured and unstructured data.  

Then everyone from sales and marketing teams to customer service has a stake in capturing, analyzing, and responding to the data.  

A CRM that offers 360 degree customer view in a company and a contact section is the right tool to adopt.

But first, let’s learn about the significance of the customer 360 views.  

Why must every business have a 360 degree customer view?

Today’s business world is highly competitive. A little leniency or delay in executing your strategy and you lose prospects.   

A CRM 360° view of the customers helps you collect and view all the customer data on one screen. Further, you can analyze, nurture, and forecast the past, present and future of your customers; here’s how:  

Customer’s past: 

The data captured in your 360 degree customer view CRM tracks and stores customer interactions with the products and services.  

This gives complete access to their interaction history. Whether it’s a price quote, general inquiry, past activities, files, or any other document, you have all the details ready.   

These data sets allow businesses to derive reports that help construct meaningful customer conversations.  

You can track your customers’ interaction history inside the CRM based on the following:  

• The recent product/service activity
• The communication done across all channels
• Product views
• Outreach campaign activity
• Entire sales process history

This is how you can access customers’ past with 360 view CRM. Further, let’s move ahead with the customer present.  

Customer’s present: 

Businesses must maintain a healthy interaction with the current customer base as they make most of the businesses’ final revenue.   

Once a client reaches out to your business to make a purchase or subscribe to your services.  

You need a system to track all their activities and stay updated with their ongoing team interaction.   

The customer 360 view in CRM software allows businesses to have the following:  

• a complete picture of the customer’s present requirements
• their position at each stage of sales pipeline
• the activities that have been executed, scheduled, or planned. 

CRM software provides a complete customer perspective to the business owner, from their identity, industry, and number of employees to the current value of their deal.   

Further, the 360 customer view in CRM helps to know the customer’s future. Here’s how? 

Customer’s future: 

Access to the complete history of customers’ past and present behaviors in their buying journey enables you to map actions easily.  

This is helpful to reps as well as business owners to strategize future business.  

Finding or creating upsell or cross-sell opportunities becomes more accessible with the data stored and easily accessed in the customer 360 degree view of your CRM software.  

And this data is collected by tracking the browsing pattern of your website visitors.  

Analyzing these patterns using CRM software, you can easily predict the customer’s buying behavior and create a suitable plan for addressing customer queries.  

CRM 360 degree view of the customer is significant as it enables you to evaluate the past, execute the present, and predict the future of a potential prospect.

6 excellent benefits of 360 degree customer view

You just learned the significance of using CRM 360 customer view. Now, let’s discuss the benefits of using CRM for creating a 360 degree customer view. 

Simplify your customer relationship  

The very primary benefit of having a 360° view of the customer in CRM is, it unifies data storage. This plays a vital role in easing your customer interaction.  

And business in today’s world aims to create a lasting customer relationships along with making profits. 

By using an intelligent and robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, you can easily streamline different departments and their records, and aggregate meaningful data about the customers. 

Using the 360 customer view of CRM, you can simplify your customer relationship by having all the required data on one page without leaving any room for human error. 

Boost predictive analysis 

As discussed above, 360 degree view of the customer lets you analyze all the past and present activity or deal with the customer.  

Collecting and maintaining the records of the customer journey allows businesses to get a clear picture of their customer’s behavior.  

This is done using the predictive analysis of the CRM software. This helps businesses find answers to the questions mentioned below: 

• Do the purchase patterns help you decode future purchases?
• Do these patterns demonstrate increased dissatisfaction at any point in the buying journey? 
• Are these patterns suggesting there might be a near-future customer churn? 
• Are your customers frequently abandoning the cart? 

If yes, why are they doing so? 

Finding answers to such crucial questions can help you achieve your organizational goals. Hence, having all the data in one place boost predictive analysis. 

Saves time and deliver better customer experience

Talking about the stats, we discussed above. It is clear that a majority of time can be saved by unifying the customer activity data.  

As a marketer, sales rep or customer success rep, you need to update and access the customer profiles and their interaction history. 

With CRM, you can access all your customer data. This detail includes their activity, deals, emails, files, texts, and notes left by your teammates.  

When all this information is easily accessible on a single screen, you ultimately save time hunting for the same.  

This is how adopting CRM 360 degree view of customer saves you time. 

Supports more customer intelligence  

Another benefit of 360 customer view is it supports more customer intelligence. Here’s how? 

When you have comprehensive data on the customers at your disposal it becomes easy to create a detailed buyer persona. 

Having behavioral information with demographic knowledge is crucial for businesses to plan for unforeseen customer-related situations. 

Such data also allows your sales team to look for any discrepancy on their part and make their sales efforts count.  

Bifurcating the set of data for deriving meaningful insights becomes more important. 

Your sales team must include various analytics and couple them with the constant customer feedback that is received by your customer service representatives. 

Drives customer loyalty with customer data

Your businesses’ future depends on the lifetime value of your customers. 

The lifetime value of your customers is directly related to the customer experience you provide. With 360 degree customer view data model you can serve your customers efficiently. This will benefit you in driving customer loyalty. 

Customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator by the year 2020. 

Are they happy with their customer journey so far? 

Is there any grievance that has not been solved yet? 

A loyal customer is 4 times more likely to buy from your competitor if the problem is service-related! So, this is how you can retain customers by using this function of CRM. 

Reduces your working costs

With more customer behavior mapping and more plans derived from the 360-degree customer view, it is possible for businesses to run intelligent and data-driven automated campaigns. 

These campaigns can exploit the upsell opportunities and avoid spending excessive money on campaigns that fail to fetch any results for your business. 

Improved visibility into customers’ psyches allows you to understand their mindset while making a purchase. 

It doesn’t make sense if businesses keep investing the same amount of money in customers who make return purchases against those who have not made a purchase. 

With enough data and a well-fetched plan based on the 360-degree view of your customers, you can also create or see opportunities for dealing with low-value customers. 

These six benefits of 360 degree customer view persuade a business owner to adopt a CRM.  

Let’s now look at what a 360 degree customer view looks like in the following section. 

How does a 360° view of the customer looks like?

The best 360 degree view of the customer is by adopting a CRM. CRMs serve as a one-stop solution for all your sales, marketing and customer success needs.  

The Contact Management function gives you the detailed view of your customer in a few clicks.  

 Right from your customer’s name, understanding their journey, managing bulk activities, adding tags and filters, and performing global search all of this can be performed from a single page with CRM. 

Salesmate CRM is one of its kind when it comes to 360 degree views of the customer. It has huge room for customization and is easily accessible to the entire team. 

With Salesmate, 360 degree customer view is all about knowing almost everything about your contact at one screen, it consists of details like:  

• Overall co-ordinates of the client.
• Activities
• Deals 
• Emails and texts 
• Files 
• Updates 
• Owner of the client and  
• Notes left by the in-house team to interact with the lead accordingly.  

All these data are filled in by the respective rep as and when discovered. With all these fields updated, you can easily understand the past, execute the present, and predict a lead’s future.  

Moreover, similar to clients you can even have a 360 degree customer view of the company.  

In the 360 degree view of the company, you have tags like: 

• Company’s name 

• Website  
• Owner and  
• Tags  

This is what CRM 360 degree looks like and how you can effortlessly execute it with Salesmate. Don’t trust my words, try it yourself by signing up for 15 days free trial. 

How does 360 view of the customer align sales, marketing, and customer success team?

At this stage, you know a lot about 360° view of customer, however, it is important to understand who benefits the most from it.  

Since, marketers interact with the prospect in the first place, let’s talk about marketing team.  

As a marketer, having 360 view of customer is a boon to planning your campaigns, outreach, tracking prospect’s activities and so on.

After marketers, sales reps interact and convert the leads. So, let’s talk about the sales team.  

As a sales rep, 360 view of customer will be your dairy to view all your clients and companies. Imagine carrying a book with zero weight and storage issues that have all the details of your deals and clients. Amazing, isn’t it? That’s what this function means to the sales team. 

Conclusion

Lastly, when the deal is won it is passed on to the customer success team. Here’s how the customer success team is benefited by 360° view of customer. 

You should focus on providing smooth customer experiences as a customer success rep. This can only be done when you have access to all the customer information, their conversation, and purchase history data to personalize communications. 

So, 360 degree customer view is a boon when used correctly. It is used by multiple departments of business and It’s extremely helpful when implemented using the right tool.