“Customer expectations continue to rise as purchasing journeys become increasingly digital and industry leaders raise the bar for compelling customer experiences.” — Why Businesses Are Prioritizing Customer Data Platforms, Forrester Consulting
Two recent Boomi webinars, now available on demand, feature APJ Marketing Director Stephanie Dechamps and Principal Solution Consultant Jack Gibson, discussing the critical importance of a 360-degree view of the customer (Customer 360) and how Boomi Master Data Hub can eliminate silos that make Customer 360 difficult to achieve.
The Need for a Customer 360 View
In “A Customer 360 View Is Crucial to an Integrated User Journey,” Dechamps points out that a frictionless customer journey, which B2C customers expect, has become a must for B2B businesses to deliver as well. Especially for technology companies that rely on subscription renewals, the customer journey must incorporate a good understanding of customer needs at every touchpoint whether it’s managed by sales, customer success, marketing, or finance.
But without a shared Customer 360 view across an organization, it’s often difficult for interactions between a customer and various business units to go smoothly throughout the journey. Information already provided is asked for again. Conversations become stalled when not everyone in the journey sequence is fully aware of what has already taken place. And frustrated customers become former customers.
The same demands hold true for finding and acquiring new customers. Narrowing down an organization’s total addressable market (TAM) to ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer persona, layering it with 3rd party intent data, 1st party engagement and conversion, is a multi-source, data-driven exercise. Likewise, determining what kind of content will resonate with a prospect requires looking at how the company attracts and engages with existing customers.
Recent research finds that as a business or consumer makes its way from prospect to customer nearly 30 interactions take place before a buying decision is made. And most of today’s prospective customers prefer digital interactions. The data generated in these exchanges must be visible and accessible to everyone on an account team. That’s Customer 360. And it requires a streamlined, efficient, integrated, trustworthy data supply chain. Not a proliferation of data silos.
Data Silos: Roadblocks to a Smooth Customer Journey
In “Eliminate Silos With a Customer 360 View and Boomi Master Data Hub“, Jack Gibson sets the scene by digging into the challenges businesses face developing, managing, and maintaining a 360-degree view of the customer.
Businesses want it to be easy for customers to self-serve. They want to provide innovative, AI based technologies like chatbots, engage with customers across social channels, support a reliable, high-performance supply chain, and deliver an authentic, frictionless omnichannel experience, while boosting revenue.
Gibson is quick to note the common thread linking all these desired business outcomes is fast, reliable access to accurate, high quality data.
“One of the major issues we see is siloed data,” Gibson explains. “Companies are onboarding new systems and there are a lot of SaaS applications out there. And each line of business often operates its own silo.”
There’s also a lot of “dark” data in these environments — as much as 60 percent of an organization’s data is unknown or underutilized, he says. It’s impossible to use data if you don’t know it exists. Dark data and data silos contribute to a customer journey broken by gaps in the flow of data that should be easily accessible to teams that manage customer journey touchpoints.
Creating a Single Source of Truth
When most people think of data and Customer 360, they think about integration. And we get it. One of the core services the Boomi Enterprise Platform offers is integration, and we’re excellent at it. With most organizations having on average 400 discrete data sources, point-to-point integrations just will not cut it. Nevertheless, integration alone is necessary but not sufficient to build a sustainable Customer 360 solution.
Once applications and data are connected, a Customer 360 solution must have a single source of truth for customer data. And processes must be automated so all the applications in use have the latest information and changes are constantly synchronized with that source of truth.
Once Gibson introduces the Boomi platform and the breadth of its capabilities, he takes a deep dive into how integration and Boomi Master Data Hub can create a unified customer experience and a Customer 360 view across the operating units of an organization. Master Data Hub is the synchronization and enrichment engine that makes a 360-view of the customer possible.
Gibson offers this quote about the value of Boomi from Dave Chapman, the Chief Technology Officer of WLTH, a thriving Australian fintech firm. “(Data) access at anytime, anywhere doesn’t happen out of thin air — there are hundreds of data sets running across different technologies and cloud service providers that need to be synchronized. Boomi does that.”
To learn more about how Boomi facilitates Customer 360 with integration and Master Data Hub be sure to check out these on-demand webinars: