360° Customer Intelligence: How to Hear Everything Your Customers Are Telling You

But how can you hear what customers are really saying? Your company can access so much data that you may struggle to sift the relevant from the irrelevant. Valuable feedback could be vanishing into obscure data sets and inboxes no one is checking. Meanwhile, it can be hard to know where to allocate your resources and ensure you’re covering all the channels your customers use.

For brands in every vertical, 360° customer intelligence gives brands a solution to the challenge of listening to their customers. By implementing the right processes, you can gather insights across multiple points in the customer journey and gain a clear view of your customers and their experiences so you can deliver the high-quality experiences they crave.

Let’s look at what 360° customer intelligence means and how to make it work for your business.

What is 360° customer intelligence?

Your customers likely use multiple channels to engage with your brand: email, text, social media platforms, call centers, and online surveys, for example. In response, your brand needs systems to gather feedback and centralize the data from all these interactions, so you can gain a complete view of your customers and respond to their actual wants and needs, rather than working off partial or fragmented information.

That’s the idea behind 360° customer intelligence. In a nutshell, it’s a holistic strategy to listen to what your customers are saying about your product or brand and understand their needs, expectations, and preferences across all the different channels they use, and then use that knowledge to provide more seamless experiences.

This approach depends on extensive automation. Sophisticated solutions are required to gather these customer insights across different platforms and then tie those data points together, presenting a complete picture of their relationship with your brand. For instance, is the person asking for a refund as a new customer, or a longtime member of your loyalty program? The answer could affect how you handle that person’s request—and how they feel about their encounter with your customer service department.

What can brands do with 360° customer intelligence?

More advanced customer intelligence enables you to sort through all your data from customer interactions, pick out the most relevant information, and present it in a way that helps you and your team make smarter decisions. As a result, you can provide superior service to your customers, while finding more effective ways to market your products.

On an individual level, this approach enables you to deliver more satisfying, personalized experiences. Let’s say a customer messages you with a complaint on Instagram, calls your support line, and then sends a follow-up email. If your representative has a complete record of all these interactions at their fingertips, they can solve the customer’s problem faster and provide more effective support. If the same customer later contacts you on Facebook, your social media team should be able to check the log to understand the context and deliver a personalized response.

Through all this data gathering, you gain massive stores of helpful information on all your customers and their behavior. Your analytics team can plumb this data to uncover exactly who your customers are, what products they buy, where and how often they make purchases, and more. Once you know exactly what types of people are becoming customers, it becomes far easier not only to drive repeat conversions, but also to find new customers in a similar mold. And there are countless other ways you can use such data insights.

With the right tools, you can provide your team with even more active, personalized assistance in making decisions. For example, Emplifi Service Cloud’s AI can analyze a customer’s profile history and suggest to customer service agents what steps they should take next.

The benefits of continuously hearing your customers

Customer expectations have radically changed, as tech giants like Amazon and Google have popularized convenient new ways to shop, buy, and ask for help. Today’s consumers have learned to love fast, effortless interactions with brands—and companies that fall short risk losing their business.

At the same time, the sheer amount and complexity of data generated by today’s digital world make it all too easy to lose your customers’ voices in all the noise. In this environment, a 360° customer intelligence strategy is the only way to deliver the fast response times and personalized assistance your customers have come to expect.

More holistic customer intelligence also has operational benefits. Armed with the right information, customer service agents can solve queries more quickly, avoid asking customers to repeat the same information, and reduce the number of interactions it takes to resolve a problem. Such seamless service results in more satisfied customers and reduces employee workloads, and cuts the cost of providing high-quality service.

Finally, brands should consider the immense strategic value of data-driven customer insights and planning. Deeper, more comprehensive customer intelligence can guide you to better decisions about marketing campaigns, customer service strategy, and more. If you’re not tapping its power, your rivals probably are—and you may lose ground in the battle for customers’ hearts and minds. 

An investment in the future

The top brands are already using 360° customer intelligence processes to feed their CX strategies and help them create a frictionless experience for their customers. Many of the world’s smaller brands haven’t caught up yet—which offers an opportunity for those who do. If you succeed in harnessing the same strategy, you’ll set yourself apart from the competition.

Fortunately, you don’t need to be a Google to master this new way of listening to customers. Rather than create their own systems from scratch, brands can purchase robust third-party solutions such as Emplifi Service Cloud. Such investments pay off in reduced response times, more satisfied customers, and lower costs over time.

If you’re interested in getting started with 360° customer intelligence, book a demo with Emplifi today.