Today, customer data is more disparate, diverse, and distributed than ever before. Here's an interesting case in point: The data from a recent study by Luth Research demonstrated that a customer looking to purchase a car went through as many as 900+ digital interactions!

Whether it is demographics, transactions, usage behavior, or reviews and feedback, customers are constantly generating a web of complex data that businesses need to mine quickly and accurately. This is precisely why Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence(AI) have become indispensable. According to Servion Global Solutions, "By 2025, as many as 95 percent of all customer interactions will be through channels supported by artificial intelligence (AI) technology".

‍Hence, the customer data wheel needs to run continuously at the pace of the industry and generate actionable insights in real-time. This is only possible when there is a single source of truth for all customer data, i.e. a Customer 360° view that seamlessly combines diverse customer data hubs like CRM, product databases, customer service records, industry reports on customer behavior, and multi-channel interactions of customers online.

Need for Customer 360° & a Single Source of Truth

Risk of Premature Abandonment in the Customers' Journey

Customers are likely to abandon their journey with a brand prematurely if:

• their needs are not addressed with real value,
• they don't feel heard, or
• they are not rewarded for their loyalty.

The lack of a reliable and actionable Customer 360° view is at the heart of early abandonment by customers in their journey of interacting with a business. It is not only expensive but also often irrecoverable for businesses.

A Forrester Research study in 2018 found that 42% of customer service agents were unable to efficiently address customer grievances due to their inability to easily access complete customer information. Further, 45% of customers abandon a transaction due to a lack of timely support.

Businesses Are Vying for Customers' Loyalty with Deep Personalization

Research suggests that 79% of customers won't consider an offer unless it is customized to their previous interactions (Marketo). In fact, personalization is not a one-time affair, it is a constant reality. Customers today expect businesses to have an inside-out understanding of their needs, wants, and preferences, making Customer 360° inevitable and unavoidable.

Customers also expect swift and intelligent service that requires minimum intervention at their end. Lastly, as they hop from one device to another and from one channel to another, they expect businesses to create a consistent, unique, and "at the moment" experience every time. This is only possible if the Customer 360° view is used to factor in all of their interactions across websites, mobile apps, online channels, and digital stores to personalize customer experiences and interactions. It is not surprising, therefore, that Marketers attain 5X to 8X higher ROI when using personalization.
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Alignment Between Sales and Marketing is No Longer Optional

There was a time when the Sales and Marketing arms of a business could work in silos. Today, such a set-up would be self-defeating. Customer journeys are now increasingly spreading thin across multiple channels (e.g., email and chat, websites, apps, voice calls, eCommerce stores, review sites, etc.) and customers keep navigating from one channel to another, and sometimes even operate on multiple channels at a time.B

But depending on whether a channel is a Sales channel or a Marketing channel, each channel has a unique data environment of its own and operates on datasets that are different and distinct from those of other channels. Since the Sales and Marketing data environments are not connected in real-time (even though the customer is the same), it leads to disjointed experiences for the customer. It also gives the Sales Team and the Marketing Team a distorted view of the customer's reality which can be avoided by using the Customer 360° view.

A case in point is a recent study by Aberdeen Group which reported that by successfully aligning Sales and Marketing, businesses can generate 32% higher revenue, retain 36% more customers, and attain 38% higher win rates. Further, the higher the alignment, the more the brand awareness and the larger the average deal size.

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Yet, Customer 360° is Still Elusive for Most Businesses

Unifying diverse forms of customer data that are growing exponentially and then extracting meaningful insights from them in real-time is no easy task. Not to mention that such an endeavor can easily burn a hole in the business' coffers without any positive ROI in sight even after months of pumping capital, talent, and technical resources. According to a study, as much as 66% of customer analytics respondents cite linking data from disparate sources as their top challenge.

This is despite the fact that large organizations perceived data-driven marketing for the individual to be the most exciting opportunity in 2019.

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‍‍‍According to another study, "fewer than 10% of companies have a 360° customer view, and only 5% use this view to systemically grow their businesses. Less than 10% of companies understand how to use a 360° view for growth."
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How Compliance Impacts Customer 360°

Whether it is the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in the E.U. or the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) in the U.S., data privacy regulations are constantly changing. They are geared to give customers control of their data. This means that Customer 360° comes with its own share of legal caveats, obligations, and liabilities. For businesses, ensuring compliance with data confidentiality laws and following consent requirements is a must. Further, the massive influx of customer data change requests, data deletion requests, opt-in/opt-out requests, and data privacy inquiries are critical to be managed for necessary compliance.

Creating Customer Data Synergy with MECBot's Customer 360° View

The 3 Pillars of Customer 360°

Back in 2011, when we started conceptualizing MECBot - our flagship data excellence platform for all enterprise AI needs - the Customer 360° view was one of the first modules that we had developed, piloted, and commercialized. Since then, it has garnered an overwhelming response from our clients and partners.

The underlying framework of MECBot's Customer 360° feature consists of 3 key pillars as outlined below:

• Voice of Customer: Data on Customer Feedback, Reviews, and Inquiries.
• Voice of the Business: Product, Sales, and Marketing Data.
• Customer Profile: Demographic, Transactional, and Behavioral Data.

MECBot's Customer 360° architecture is shown in the following image:
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MECBot's Customer 360° Capabilities

Customer Identity Resolution Using AI-Powered CDP

Customer identity resolution is all about unifying the various identities of each customer across all online and offline channels while adhering to data privacy compliance. MECBot's Customer Data Platform (CDP) stitches together first-, second-, and third-party customer data to create a single customer view.

Businesses can then generate purpose-driven customer views based on logical rules and query them in the natural English language. Customer identity resolution helps businesses to uniquely identify or "spot" each customer in any online or offline environment. This enables micro-personalization at a granular level without any loss of transparency.

Through such deep personalization, MECBot generates possible next-best steps for delivering personalized customer experiences, capitalizing on up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, augmenting customer engagement and loyalty, and maximizing the customer's lifetime value.

Intelligent Customer Segmentation for Greater Product Penetration

MECBot helps you to proactively capture a higher share of your customers' wallets by up-selling and cross-selling products and services to each customer segment that they will find the most useful and enticing. It correlates the movement of customers and segments across pricing tiers and design offers that make the most sense to each group. It also tracks, monitors, and provides recommendations to optimize metrics like ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue), MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue), and RFMC (Recency, Frequency, Monetary, and Clumpiness) to reduce Customer Churn Rate and maximize Customer Lifetime Value.

Customer Health Scores

The "Intelligent Customer Engagement 2019-20" report by Nemertes Research surveyed 518 organizations and noted that 43.6% of organizations now calculate the Customer Health Score. Customer health scores don't just pinpoint the crisis segments. They also identify the low-hanging fruits, i.e. opportunities that businesses can capitalize on right away.MECBot helps to answer business-critical questions like:

• Which customers are about to leave? Why? What can businesses do to stop them?
• Which leads are ready for purchase? Which product/service are they most likely to buy? Which channel are they most likely to convert in?
• Which customers are looking for an upgrade or a new offering? How can it be customized to their current and future needs?

Traceability and Stewardship of Customer Data Using MDM

With MECBot, businesses can centrally onboard customer data, pre-process, clean, and unify disparate data, explore relationships across the data, query the data, unlock hidden patterns, and safeguard data integrity at each step of the process. MECBot empowers customer data stewards by ensuring completeness, accuracy, and traceability of data and insights.With MECBot, businesses can automatically run a Marketing ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) pipeline with trusted data to clean, pre-process, blend, and assimilate all data that can be visualized using MECBot's native reporting or external visualization tools.

About MECBot

Powered by innovations in AI, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Deep Learning, MECBot is a leading data excellence platform for all your enterprise data needs. It puts your business first by adopting the Domain Ontology without any dependency on the underlying databases or the structure of the data. With MECBot, a business model can be directly created by CXOs, Data Scientists, or Data Analysts, or all of them collaboratively. MECBot directly pulls the data from the configured sources and maps it to the specified Business Domain-Entity Model.In MECBot's smart data grid or Knowledge Graph, relationships between the data are first-class citizens. Since graphs are highly versatile and flexible formal data structures, all the available data formats can be easily converted into graphs using standard tools.

In MECBot, these tools are embedded into an automated functionality that underlies the data ingestion process and converts all ingested data instantly into graph format without any coding by the user.

Unlike other platforms where data needs to be teleported to various external tools for advanced analytics and modeling, MECBot's AI, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning modules work out-of-the-box and allow you to build models like loyalty, churn rate optimization, and segmentation within the platform without having to dump the file or moving the data around.

Interested? Learn more about MECBot here.

Wish to take a deep dive into what MECBot can do for your business? Request a demo here: https://formcept.com/contact/