So you have a Customer 360 — now what? Top 3 use cases for marketing teams

If your organization has recently invested in creating Customer 360s, you probably already know how powerful and game-changing they can be for your marketing efforts. After all, once you've got accurate Customer 360s, it's easier than ever to create segments, lists, and audiences out of your customer data platform (CDP) — which you can use to send tailored messaging based on real data.

But did you know that Customer 360s have other potential uses as well?

Below, we take a quick look at Customer 360s and why they are such a powerful part of modern marketing. We also review some of the key ways you can use it in marketing, sales, and customer support functions.

What is a Customer 360?

A Customer 360 is a single, comprehensive profile that holds all of your business's data about one of your customers or users. They're also sometimes called 360 views or customer 360 profiles. 

They are created by consolidating customer data from disparate systems, including your:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system
• Point of Sales (POS) system
• Accounting system
• Marketing tools 
• Website analytics tools
• First-party data (ex: forms and surveys)
• Third-party data providers
• and more

A Customer 360 can contain anything from a customer’s demographics to their purchase history, transaction details, customer support tickets, actions on your website, and more. Any data you collect about your customers can be included in a Customer 360.

This data is ultimately what makes Customer 360s so powerful. By consolidating all of your data into a single profile, Customer 360s offer you the opportunity to design your marketing, sales, and support strategies with as much information as possible. This allows for true 1:1 marketing and the bespoke, hyper-personalized touch that customers have increasingly come to expect. 

The top Customer 360 use cases

1. Design and implement 1:1 marketing

When most businesses think about Customer 360s, this is the use case that comes to mind. And for good reason: Customer 360s offer a powerful tool for marketing teams to leverage throughout the customer lifecycle. 

While each business needs to determine for itself how to use Customer 360s in its marketing efforts, some ideas include:

• Breaking out customers into different segments based on similarities they exhibit, for example, based on geographics, behavior, psychographics, and demographics
• Generating customer audiences and lists to receive specific marketing messages, for example, through social or email, that are designed to resonate with them
• Deploy true 1:1 marketing where messaging is tailored to individual customers using the data that you know about them

By leveraging Customer 360s for marketing, you increase the likelihood that your messaging will hit its target and achieve its desired result — whether that’s more sales, interactions, sign-ups, or some other action. That means more ROI for your campaigns and, ideally, a boost to your bottom line.

2. Optimize your cross-selling and up-selling strategies

Customer 360s aren’t just limited to your marketing team, however. By becoming more data-driven in their approach, your sales team can also see a lot of success: converting one-time customers into repeat customers and boosting the lifetime value of your customers.  

Consider, for example, the different ways that your sales team can leverage customer data to optimize their cross-selling and up-selling strategies:

• Tailoring product recommendations based on what you know about your customers, such as their interests 
• Recommending products based on similarities shared with other customers via a “Customers also purchased” option
• Prompting renewals and reorders based on purchase dates and time; for example, if you know that customers tend to order replacements or refills 10 months after an initial purchase

In this way, Customer 360s help power demand generation, retention, and referrals, supercharging your growth flywheel and making it easier to hit your targets. 

3. Provide tailored customer support

Likewise, the data in your Customer 360s can be leveraged by members of your customer support team to facilitate more meaningful, helpful, and human support, as long as your profiles include all the right data. 

For example, when a customer submits a ticket or calls for support, your support team can:

• Immediately see past tickets submitted by the customer. If the customer sees the same issue as they did in the past, this can point your support team quickly to an effective resolution; if it’s unrelated, the context can help your team diffuse any potential hostility.
• See which pages of your website the customer has recently viewed — potentially including pages about your cancellation, refund, or subscription policies, which might point to a customer who is unhappy with their product.
• Take notes on the interaction which can be used in future interactions should the customer contact you again looking for support. 

How to build an accurate Customer 360

Haven't begun creating Customer 360s yet but wanted to know if they're worth the effort and the investment? After reading about the use cases above, we hope you'll join us in offering a resounding “Yes!” to that question.

Bought in, but don't know where to start? An accurate Customer 360 requires two key pieces of technology:

• A cloud data warehouse (CDW) capable of consolidating customer data from multiple systems into a single location where it can be analyzed, cleaned, and formatted 
• A customer data platform (CDP) capable of transforming that data into valuable, easy-to-use insights

The Simon CDP, designed and purpose-built to sit on top of a Cloud Data Platform like Snowflake, is today's most powerful solution. 

An easy-to-navigate interface means that your sales, marketing, and support teams can all begin gleaning valuable insights from Customer 360s with little to no technical skill required. Strategic deployment of AI throughout the platform means that it's easier than ever to process vast amounts of data and put it to work in impactful campaigns. 

Ready to learn more? Take a free virtual tour of Simon’s platform today.