With the variety of choices that customers have today, a poor customer experience often results in them choosing your competitors. In fact, 70% of customers stop doing business with a company due to poor customer experience.

It’s not just the risk of losing your customers, but reputation too. Customers today don’t shy away from sharing their stories of poor experiences on social media. Thus, leading to negative word of mouth, poor reputation, and, ultimately, reduced sales.

The solution? Amazing customer experience powered by customer 360. 

A customer 360 platform unifies data from different functions of your business on a single screen, leveraging essential CRM features. This helps you provide a personalized experience for your prospects and increase sales significantly. To boot, it helps retain customers, not just attract them.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the crux of customer 360 and how you can use it to improve your customer experience significantly. 

Customer 360 Customer 360

What is customer 360?

 

What is customer 360?

A customer 360 view gives you an overview of all your customer interactions in one place.

This includes information covering the entire customer journey from website visits to post-purchase support and billing. For example, you can see:

  • How a prospect found your business
  • Product features they’re browsing
  • How they’re interacting with your marketing campaigns

Essentially, the customer 360 platform consolidates various data sources and customer touchpoints to serve as a single source of truth. This helps various business departments, such as sales, marketing, and support to provide a personalized customer experience. 

Benefits of customer 360

Personalize engagement with prospects and customers alike

According to a survey by Genesys, 82% of customers say they’d buy from a company offering them a consistently personalized experience. What’s more, 81% say they’d recommend the brand to their friends and colleagues.

With customer 360, you get a bird’s eye view of all prospects’ interactions with your business. As a result, sales reps can reach out with uber-relevant messaging to nurture and convert leads better.

For example, by identifying which pages a prospect is viewing, a rep can personalize their outreach message. 

Let’s say a prospect is viewing the features page. Having easy access to this information means the rep can reach the prospect with more information on the features they’re interested in instead of talking to them about pricing.

Seamless customer experience across channels

Interestingly, well over half — 68% of the customers — say a good experience over messaging channels is very important for their loyalty to a brand.

However, a key aspect of offering an engaging customer experience is ensuring the conversation is streamlined across channels.

This can be challenging as 67% of customers use multiple channels to complete just one transaction. A customer 360 view can resolve the problem by showing all customer interactions in one place.

Meaning: sales reps and customer support agents can see all the (previous and ongoing) interactions that a customer is having across various channels and with different agents.

Using it, reps can have contextual conversations without having to ask customers for details they’ve already shared with other agents.

This streamlines the customer experience who hears a single voice from the company. 

Enhanced reporting and analytics for informed decision making

With all customer data in one place, it’s easy for representatives from various departments to create custom reports.

Plus, the reports are more complete than otherwise as reps can easily access cross-departmental data. For example, a sales rep can see how prospects are interacting with marketing emails and understand what interests them.

Naturally, better reporting also assists in identifying opportunities for improving conversion throughout the customer journey. 

Using customer 360 view: how a CRM helps

With the definition and benefits of customer 360 out of the way, let’s show you show CRM doubles as a customer 360 platform:

 

1. Get all customer information on one screen

When it comes to sales, quick and accurate responses to customer queries make all the difference between deals closed and leads choosing competitors.

Sales reps’ success, therefore, heavily relies on having access to all customer data in one place. Instead of having to jump through different platforms and/or screens to pinpoint one piece of data.

A CRM like Freshsales Suite saves reps from all this productivity-impacting hassle. How so? By offering an intuitive and simple interface featuring all vital information — gathered from various sources — on one screen.

 

Here’s how customer data is organized on the screen:

  • Summary, offering a brief rundown of the customer’s essential and demographic information such as name, company, contact information, salesperson assigned, and more.

  • Highlights, covering a contact’s background information. Contact open deals or orders, active marketing lists, meeting notes by the assigned salesperson, and support tickers in progress are some details you’ll find here.

  • Details, providing an in-depth dive into a contact’s activities arranged in an activity timeline. This way, you can see how a prospect’s interacting with your business. For instance, links clicked, web pages visited, marketing emails received, and more.

Armed with this contextual information, sales reps can drive productive sales meetings with healthy chances of successful deal closure.

Contact landing page Contact landing page

2. Improve team collaboration for a streamlined experience

Around 88% of brands agree that providing a unified customer experience over various messaging channels helps them see more repeat customers.

The problem? Sales and marketing teams work in silos with little to no alignment. With a CRM powered by sales and marketing automation, you can break silos to offer tailored customer experiences.

Wondering how that works? Freshsales Suite provides both teams a shared view of customer data, which furthers collaboration.

For instance, marketing teams can see how well their marketing-driven leads convert. On the flip side, the sales team can gain visibility into how prospects are interacting with marketing campaigns.

 

Customer 360 - Activity timeline Customer 360 - Activity timeline

 

3. Align sales and support teams with enhanced integration with helpdesk

The Freshsales Suite encourages sales and support teams alignment too.  By integrating with our helpdesk software, Freshdesk, the sales and support teams get visibility into the customer data from each other’s departments, enabling them to build contextual and meaningful customer relationships.

Case in point: the sales team can view open tickets, which helps them tailor conversations accordingly and, subsequently, close deals faster.

They can also access customer reports such as:

  • How many tickets are open — filtered by time granularity, status, customer priority, and assignee
  • How many customer issues are resolved and how many are open
  • How long a customer has been waiting (average wait time) or how long it has taken to solve the issue (resolution time)

   

Customer 360 - Support tickets Customer 360 - Support tickets

 

Similarly, the support team can provide faster and priority support for at-risk and premium customers. This is possible because they can access critical data for context such as:

Access to customer data 360 view enables the team to provide personalized support, increasing customer brand loyalty.

4. Leverage AI-powered insights and suggestions for engaging leads better

With Freshsales Suite, you can leverage AI to boost your sales reps' productivity — closing better deals faster. Here’s how implementing AI in sales and marketing functions can help your teams:

  • Identify warm leads so reps reach out to ones who are ready to convert
  • Nurture prospects better using algorithm-based suggestions for taking action. For example, use AI’s suggestion for the best time to email a particular lead
  • Save sinking deals in time and focus on deals to prioritize using AI-powered deal tags such as ‘At-risk,’ ‘Gone cold,’ and ‘Trending’
Customer 360 - Deal insights Customer 360 - Deal insights

5. Customize your CRM based on your unique business needs

Appreciate all the benefits of customer 360 that a CRM offers but are uncertain of making big changes to your toolkit.

With a CRM like Freshsales Suite, you can customize the setup as per your requirements. For example:

  • Decide essential details you want to see in a contact page’s summary section
  • Select customer and account details you want the CRM to highlight
  • Handpick integrations you want to see on the contact page
  • More importantly, rearrange the way the information is organized as per the importance of details unique to your business
Customer 360 - Customization Customer 360 - Customization

Improve your customer experience today

In a nutshell, customer 360 gives your teams a full dive into all customer interactions with your business. Consequently, it serves as the single source of truth that pools data from across departments in one place. Teams can use it to:

  • Plan hyper-personalized marketing campaigns
  • Target, nurture, and convert better leads, faster
  • Streamline communication across channels

Not to forget, a customer 360 view aligns various teams and improves team collaboration.

With the right CRM, getting a customer 360 view becomes easy. You can read all data throughout the customer journey funnel on one screen.

So what are you waiting for? Sign up for Freshsales Suite today and drive your sales through the roof while offering an exceptional customer experience.

Customer 360 Customer 360