Understanding Customer Behaviour to Drive Results

The concept of "Customer 360" has existed in the industry for many years and has subsequently become one of the most popular buzz terms for many marketing and sales departments. As technology and data collection processes have developed over time, marketers now have the ability to better understand their customers at a truly comprehensive level. For instance, organizations can create customer profiles that include their past history, recent purchases, tools to predict what they may buy in the future, items they like, and more. Ultimately, gathering this information is the penultimate goal of any company, as it allows organizations to deliver personalized experiences and generate notable bottom-line results. Fortunately, there are several ways your retail organization can capture, analyze, and manage valuable customer data.

Why Customer 360 Matters

Customer 360 is not only extremely valuable for knowing your customer at various angles, but also for understanding where they want to be in the future. By creating unique personas, your organization can easily identify the needs of each customer and offer solutions based on that criteria.

A true 360-degree customer view must include the following details:

• Past: Provides a full and direct overview of customer history. This may include information on product or policy activity, interaction history, campaign activity, process activity, and more.
• Present: Displays significant customer information concerning who they are and their relationship with your retail company. Additionally, this view can show current orders and reasons for why the customer is engaged with the organization at the present moment.
• Future: Presents indicators that can be used for predicting your future relationship with the customer. For instance, does the customer seem likely to disengage? Or, are there opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell?

Successfully adapting to changing market conditions, consumer sentiment, and trends to provide a personalized customer experience depends on your data collection. Fortunately, data can be sourced from multiple outlets including customer history (batch), public sentiment (streaming), and marketing data.

Integrating Customer Data with Cornerstone®

As the importance of data applications steadily increases over time, new strategies for customer analytics have also emerged. While customer interactions grow and become more diversified, organizations must adapt and find the most efficient tools to rapidly integrate data and deliver real-time insights. Fortunately, leading Big Data product Cornerstone® can get you the data that you need quickly, in a standardized method, from multiple sources. This self-service platform automates the hard part, i.e. data prep, so developers do not have to get involved. Therefore, more time in the marketing department can be dedicated towards crafting intelligent campaigns and work with Artificial Intelligence tools, to serve customers with more personalized campaigns and products.

If your company is concerned with collecting and integrating customer data, Next Pathway can help. Please feel free to  contact us for more information.