To be able to offer a holistic and personalized experience to their customers, companies must consider the customer’s buying habits, purchasing history, related interests and their interactions with the company. Gaining this perspective means integrating data from a number of sources, including order history, CRM, geo location, customer support, and others. 

Customer 360 refers to a comprehensive view of a customer so that all teams can access the most complete and up to date information about a customer, and use this data to enhance the customer experience and prevent poor service delivery. Implementing Customer 360 use cases requires a continuously evolving process, as new sources of data and the data itself are constantly updated. It involves both technical implementation and organizational buy-in. Customer 360 is all about providing real-time insights by consolidating data and processing it via fast transactional-analytics data pipeline. it breaks down silos and avoids duplication,

These insights can be implemented to improve revenue, reduce churn and enhance customer loyalty. 

From Customer 360 to Business 360

Some organizations have chosen to apply the objectives of customer 360 – to obtain a centralized and comprehensive collection of your customers’ data and experiences with your organization – and apply that to the company as a whole. Business 360 entails gaining a complete understanding of the company’s overall health and performance in a consolidated real-time view of its business entities – not just the customer, it also includes product, financial and operational data. A 360-degree view of the business empowers leaders to accelerate business strategies with trusted data to support strategic initiatives such as customer experience, supply chain resilience, digital commerce, financial management, and more. 

Benefits of implementing Business 360 include:

• Increased decision-making accuracy: improved understanding of the business based on accurate, comprehensive and often real-time data enables timely insights and decisions leads that can improve business performance 
• Improved operational efficiency: organization can identify areas where waste can be reduced and processes can be enhanced to boost efficiency 
• Enhanced customer experience: businesses can fine-tune the customer experience  based on a holistic view of customer behavior and interactions
• Reduced risk: with comprehensive data from multiple sources, businesses can reduce risk by identifying potential problems before they occur 

Developing a Business 360 Framework 

Achieving this holistic view requires understanding and analysis of the organization’s strategies, performance, internal operations, and processes. 

To begin, organizations must first gain a deep understanding of the organization’s business processes and workflows. By collaborating with business stakeholders, they can identify critical data points and develop data models and processes that align with specific business needs. Then organizations can create comprehensive data roadmaps that outline the organization’s current data landscape and its future direction, and use this for strategic decisions for product development, pricing, and marketing. These roadmaps consider the organization’s growth plans, technological advancements, and industry trends.

Key components of Business 360 include:  

• Strategic Planning: examining the company’s long-term goals and the strategies designed to achieve these objectives 
• Financial Analysis: assessing financial metrics to understand the company’s financial health from financial statements, revenue, expenses, profit margins and related reports
• Operations: examining overall productivity and efficiency of internal processes and supply chain management
• Human Resources: scrutinizing workforce capabilities, employee engagement and talent management.
• Marketing and Sales: evaluating sales performance, marketing efforts, customer acquisition strategies, and customer retention strategies

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Technical considerations in establishing Customer 360 and Business 360

Customer 360 and Business 360 capability depends on having visibility into data across all systems. A number of technical capabilities are required to ensure that the data is accurate and up to date. 

Acquiring Insights in Near Real Time

For businesses to be able to respond quickly to events, fresh, accurate data is required in a clear format. While historical data may be adequate for certain decisions and courses of action, others require the most up to date information. For example, a customer success agent needs to view all of the customer’s interactions with the company, including recent purchases and  open tickets. If the agent is dependent upon stale data, or is missing a component from an unavailable system, they will not be able to assist the customer resolve their issues. 

Attaining visibility into the data  

To offer an all-encompassing view of the customer, advanced technological solutions are required to integrate data from disparate systems of record (SoRs). For most enterprises, data resides in more than one location – on premises, and/or in the cloud or multiple clouds. Data sources may be structured or semi-structured, and comprise relational databases, NoSQL databases, object stores, file systems, or message brokers. Integrating all this data so that the business can use it effectively from these numerous disparate sources and formats is no small challenge. For example, a retailer who wants to promote a new line of workout clothes requires data to identify customers who are athletic and who may have purchased this type of clothing in the past. The answers lie in various systems such as the CRM and Support Portal, exposing order history, customer profile, chat interactions on the website and with customer support. 

All this data may be ingested via streaming or batch processes. Specific technological implementations are needed to combine this data into a unified data model from which insights may be obtained. The solution must scale to handle increasing data volumes from diverse data sources that safeguard the organization from data bottlenecks and other performance and availability issues. Data governance frameworks and robust security measures are also necessary to establish data quality standards, and continuous monitoring of data pipelines to prevent data inaccuracies, from the structured and unstructured data that is ingested from multiple sources. 

Achieving agility 

To gain and maintain a competitive edge, organizations offer new, innovative services. Whereas legacy development could only be achieved by skilled developers, and often could take months, new low code initiatives enable companies to quickly release services without requiring heavy investment in time and staffing resources. This shortened cycle dramatically improves the organization’s time to value. 

Managing Customer 360 and Business 360 environments  

Finding a solution that offers a full view of the customer in near real time, that provides fresh, accurate data from multiple disparate sources and also enables scale, agility and security requires numerous integrations and tweaks. Managing this environment can require extensive resources, monitoring and upkeep. 

Creating a single source of truth

Effective Customer 360 and Business 360 implementations and processes require true visibility into all information about the entity, near real time data on which to make decisions, and the agility to be able to quickly act upon and implement new services based on the given insights. 

Onboarding an Operational Data Hub for Customer 360 Initiatives

An operational data hub such as Smart DIH, also available as a service, streamlines data integration processes and reduces development overhead by unifying data from multiple SoRs into a low-latency, high-performance data management layer that is accessed by APIs and events. Data management strategies can then align with business goals so that data solutions support the company’s growth and competitiveness.

Smart DIH is an out-of-the-box implementation that offers organizations a unified view of their business entities, enabling frictionless customer journeys powered by data consistency across all digital channels. This unified, real-time, accurate view enables strategic decisions that have a meaningful impact on a company’s operations, enabling the implementation of Customer 360 and Business 360 across the organization. 

Utilizing ML Capabilities

AI and machine learning models, combined with business semantic models, help create new dynamic segments, inform decisions and improve the experience of both customers and the business objects. 

Last notes 

Customer 360 use cases, especially when implemented with an operational data hub, and augmented with machine learning, offers organizations a unified view of their business entities, with infrastructure that is oriented to building customer centric applications. This alignment fosters a symbiotic relationship between data and business, driving innovation and optimizing operational efficiency. By offering a superb omni-channel customer experience using a hub that provides improved agility and performance, with quickly developed microservices, organizations can  quickly introduce new, personalized services in days instead of weeks.