The 360-degree client view

At the start of each CRM implementation, which should occur at the latest by the time you conduct the first Fit/Gap workshops with business users, a 360-degree client view will be one of the most popular subjects.

Once started, you will soon discover that most, if not all, business units and representative stakeholders will become passionately involved in these discussions. These discussions, and consequently, the design of your 360-degree client view, will provide you with a great opportunity to create a solid foundation for your CRM solution. The 360-degree client view will not only be the tool that your company uses to record and assist the customer across all your channels with the best possible customer experience, but it will be the strategic approach for your business to streamline processes and reduce operational costs.

A 360-degree client view often initiates a big debate between all the key players and business stakeholders. The discussions taking place are mostly about the type of client data needed in order for the business unit to be more efficient. Additionally, it's important to define who should be entitled to see what type of data (entitlement) from customers (role-based). A discussion about how much information is enough information to be on a client page will also need to occur. What absolutely needs to be there at the minimum and what is considered too much, to the point that it could make the system expensive?

This is the type of information that the architects, together with the application manager, of which there is typically only one per application, will need. These people will need to make design decisions about where this information comes from, where it should be placed, how it should be imported to the 360-degree client view, how to keep it updated, and how often to synchronize the data.

In an average company, there are many different types of users. They have different roles, different business needs, and are in a different capacity when interacting with the client and using the system. All these users will be using the same system and the same data repository, but where they differ is that they'll all be using the systems in very different scenarios, needing a role-based and scenario-based single view.

As you can see in Figure 2.1, a 360-degree client view is a single, end-to-end story of the customer's journey with your company:

Figure 2.1: The end-to-end story of the customer's journey

Designing a sophisticated 360-degree client view that satisfies the variety of different requirements presented by all the different business units in a single company could indeed be a very complex task. It's going to require a lot of experience and a flexible design that's going to need to satisfy all the expectations of the parties involved, while improving all of the customer processes.

In a badly designed system, we may end up with too much data, or too many views, to name just two examples. Therefore, if you do not have a good and healthy comprehensive discussion at the beginning of your journey, where you can identify all the requirements, processes, and opportunities you'll need, then you'll almost certainly fail. To underline this, these discussions could indeed be very fruitful and could be the beginning of creating a great team and more importantly, they could be the start of getting everyone on board to work toward the same goal: the success of the operation at hand.

I remember working with a large international bank in London. It spent years of development time on building a 360-degree client view for its private banking and investment unit. This bank had a team of business analysts, software developers, and system engineers who spent three years, with a 100-man stark team, building this 360-degree client view. After all that time and money, they failed miserably, mainly because they ended up putting too much data on too many forms, and even too much data on one single form. There was a jungle of views and a lot of confusion among the users, coupled with the fact that there were big issues with the system performance.

A great way to grasp the concept we're talking about is to compare the idea of a single customer view with that of a Rubik's Cube. Your single customer view will not only need to be adaptable, agile, and as magical as the Rubik's Cube is, but it will need to do much more. A Rubik's Cube only has three dimensions and six faces that are covered by nine stickers. Each face is one of six solid colors: white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow. Yet, for us, our single customer view will have more dimensions and more faces.

Building a 360-degree client view could have many more faces, such as the size of the organization, the role of the user, the processes involved, the business unit requirements, the nature of the industry, and the client segment, to name a few.

So, as a result, the system needs to be flexible, and through that, it must be designed in a way that satisfies the requirements of all the users, in all the processes, over the many channels and in the different capacities that you're dealing with clients.

We can visualize the building blocks of a 360-degree client view with the aid of Figure 2.2:

Figure 2.2: The elements of building a 360-degree client view

In Figure 2.2, you can see a comparison of the faces and dimensions. With that, you can see how different the business settings might be when it comes to building a single customer view for different industries, segments, sizes, or even in the same company when you are dealing with different types of customers.

As we begin to look into the business units of a single company, often each business unit will have a unique business requirement that differs from other business units within the same company.

For example, in the financial services industry, a multinational bank can have several business units, which could include a retail unit, a corporate unit, a private banking unit, an investment banking unit, and much more. While they are all under the same company umbrella, these business units can have common customers who operate in completely different scenarios.

What is also important to highlight here is that in a comprehensive CRM system, a 360-degree client view can easily be extended to include sales, marketing, and service data. This could be sales opportunities, including both cross-selling and upselling, or the list of open cases, such as complaints and service requests for customer service, and even for marketing, where it could include current campaigns related to the client.

In summary, there are multiple parameters to be considered when creating your 360-degree client view, including your industry, volume, segment, size, and the nature of your business. To expand on them, think about this:

• In a simple but large-volume business, such as the consumer industry sector, let's say a telecom company, the focus of SCV is on storing the customer profile and limiting the use of demographic data to mainly billing purposes, but also for cross-selling and upselling purposes, and customer service.
• In a more sophisticated industry, where an extensive 360-degree client view is used, the view and knowledge should primarily enhance both the sales and marketing, but also customer satisfaction, through retail or online stores, resulting in improved customer loyalty.
• In a high-end customer services industry, such as private banking, where KYC is mandatory, extended customer knowledge is present, with a comprehensive understanding of the sales and marketing data related to the client and to the business, such as products she or he owns, share of wallet, satisfaction level, and so on.
• In this business, the CSV is the most comprehensive variation. It's used for building a trust relationship with the clients when it comes to the most sensitive matters, such as managing the wealth of clients and advising them on future financial planning, and Customer Life cycle Management (CLM).

There are some more aspects to consider when you are designing the 360-degree client view for your company. These include the Customer Health Index (CHI), a sophisticated graphical illustration of the overall customer relationship, such as the business volume, customer satisfaction level, loyalty level, profitability level, age, and segment, which can be used to empower your employees with the information they need when interacting with customers and collecting business information, with an example being shown in the screenshot that follows:

Figure 2.3: CHI in a 360-degree role-based view

Your employees need this information when doing their jobs and dealing with customers, including all the different types of operations and interactions with the customers of your company.

This is where the role-based 360-degree client view can benefit all of your employees. We will be exploring the elements of the CHI later on in this chapter.

As we have explored, the complexity of both the SCV and the 360-degree client view is role-based and industry-specific, where the size and nature of the business are important for the solution design, and above all else, company vision and strategies will ultimately need to be supported by the solution. As we have previously discussed, the most common strategies in CRM deployment are to improve the operational efficiency, reduce the cost of operations, improve customer service, improve profitability, increase client satisfaction, and subsequently increase the market share of your company.

The defining parameters are universal and the approach to building a 360-degree client view has applications in any industry, but early examples have been seen in the financial services, healthcare, government, retail, and telecommunications industries. As time goes on, every industry will benefit from it and as we have highlighted, CRM will use different terminology for the same meaning; for example, 360-degree client view and the term KYC are often used to mean the same thing in the banking industry.

Across the many implementations that I have been involved in, probably the most comprehensive 360-degree client view that I have ever seen was in the private banking sector. Here, there was in-depth customer knowledge from both the business point of view, as well as per regulatory authority requirements, which made the 360-degree client view in this industry the most complex, comprehensive, and challenging for everyone involved.

In our journey, we want to deep dive into building not only a good but a sophisticated 360-degree client view. However, we're going to be creating one that's been designed from my own experience in private banking.

This shows the best practices behind building a customer knowledge and 360-degree client view for private banking. However, take note that what we're going to build can be applied to any industry, so if you're not a bank, then don't worry!