80 percent of customers believe that their experience with a brand is just as important as the products they buy. To create a consistent, seamless journey for clients or customers, B2B and B2C companies need every internal and external channel to connect.
What is a 360-degree view of the customer? A 360-degree view gives companies a comprehensive look at their customers by combining data from every touchpoint throughout the buyer’s journey and beyond. To capture this holistic view of the customer, businesses must track the right data across all departments and centralize that data for easy access and quick insights on customers.
Salesforce allows businesses to create a 360-degree view through its Salesforce Customer 360 solution—a CRM tool that assigns one global ID to every customer and pulls in data from multiple locations to create a single contextualized profile. This global ID will enable companies to track individuals across various channels. Having access to all relevant customer information also empowers service teams to create more-integrated customer experiences, increasing sales and revenue.
Salesforce Customer 360 core features:
- Advanced audience segmentation capabilities
- Optimization abilities (based on Einstein AI insights)
- Opportunities for companies to create personalized experiences to engage customers better
- Data unification (customer website, email, telephone, social media data, and so forth) for comprehensive customer profiles
- Consent management (for channels like email and digital advertising)
Customer 360 acts as a central hub and can connect the following Salesforce platforms, apps, and experiences to track customer data for high-level and detailed analysis:
- Analytics
- Marketing Cloud
- Sales Cloud
- Commerce Cloud
- Einstein AI
As the winner of the 2021 Salesforce Partner Innovation Award for B2C Commerce for our innovative use of Salesforce Customer 360, Astound has proven expertise in how to effectively integrate Customer 360 into your business to create a seamless customer journey. Read on for our top tips for implementation:
How to Implement Customer 360 in Six Steps
Businesses must break down data silos to create interdepartmental continuity. Here’s how to successfully implement Customer 360 to integrate and centralize all customer data and make it easily accessible for every department.
- Identify sources of customer information. The first step in implementing Customer 360 is to identify which sources of information need to be connected. Start by taking inventory of where your company is currently storing customer data across your entire organization. The key is to ensure your company has access to all of its data sources.
Departments to analyze include:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Shipping
- Fulfillment
- Customer Service
- Accounting
- Prioritize data hygiene. Your business may need to clean up and standardize existing data to improve its quality and resolve or prevent duplicate data. Different databases across your organization may structure or store data differently. By standardizing data formatting for various components, like phone numbers and addresses, you’ll create more consistent and accurate records of your contacts. This step is important in ensuring that internal stakeholder groups trust the process and the data to drive platform adoption.
- Integrate your data. Next, your organization will need to connect all existing Salesforce apps to Customer 360. Your new hub will become what Salesforce dubs a single source of truth, connecting all customer identities, background information, privacy management, and marketing journeys in a central location.
- Get a 360-degree view of your customers. Create a single global ID for every customer that your entire organization can access from any Salesforce app. Having an available data model for sales, marketing, service, and commerce departments will provide your company with detailed analytics and a big-picture view of every customer. With the ability to collect and store massive amounts of online and offline customer data easily accessible cross-departmentally, you can create a strong data-driven culture within your company and design effective marketing strategies.
- Deliver personalized journeys for consumers. Finally, with all your customer information on a single-view dashboard, it’s time to deliver cross-channel, personalized experiences that meet people where they are so you can lead them smoothly down the sales funnel. Using the Salesforce Customer Data Platform (CDP), you can also segment your audience for more-specific targeting.
Customer 360 includes pre-built packages that address common Customer 360 use cases for B2C businesses. Building unified profiles for your customers will empower your business to build trust and engagement across every channel to enhance customer shopping experiences.
- Protect customer data. Salesforce Customer 360 Data Manager is a cross-cloud technology initiative that functions as a hub for customer profiles, storing and updating relevant customer information. To ensure data protection, the Customer 360 Privacy Center gives your business all the necessary tools to protect sensitive data and ensure compliance. Easily manage and transfer customer information, cleanse your system of unused data by storing it safely away, and implement custom features to meet data privacy laws.
84 percent of consumers are more loyal to businesses with healthy security controls. Securely managing personally identifiable information (PII) and avoiding dangerous data breaches will help you build greater trust with customers.
Learn more about Astound’s Salesforce implementation services.