How to get a 360-degree customer view without excess overhead

Almost every CRM on the market today touts the benefits of a “360-degree view of your customer.” Being able to save everything about a customer or prospect in a central location that is accessible to everyone can provide many benefits:

• Higher quality customer conversations
• Seamless customer experience
• Ability to see potential opportunities
• Ability to see potential problem areas and head them off proactively
• Faster problem resolution
• More efficient marketing
• Etc.

With all these benefits, it’s no wonder most CRMs and sales leaders strive to obtain a consolidated customer view.

Unfortunately, the way that traditional CRM vendors define how to achieve this 360-degree view often benefits the vendor more than the customer. Here’s what you need to know.

What is a consolidated view of the customer?

The idea behind a consolidated view of the customer enables your sales teams, customer success teams, marketing teams, and others within your organization to see a wide range of critical information about a customer in one place.

This information may include their interactions with the sales team, their interactions with marketing content, support tickets, purchase history, behavioral data, and all of the standard information that most CRMs contain, such as contact details, and more.

Seeing key information about a customer in one place is golden.

By aggregrating all of this information in one place, it enables everyone within your organization to provide a streamlined, targeted, effective experience to the customer, and to see opportunities for growth with that customer.

Your CRM vendor’s approach may be in conflict with your best interest

A consolidated view of the customer is beneficial to your organization. But the approach taken to achieve the sought-after overview can be even more beneficial to the CRM vendor...

Most CRMs suggest creating consolidated view of the customer by storing all of your customer data in their database. This leads to expensive integration projects to aggregate as much data as possible, from different systems, to the CRM, with the ambition to create the utopian “single source of truth.” For the CRM vendor, this is great news - after you have spent an silly amount of money on integrations to get your data to their systems, they now have you on the hook for whatever changes, price increases, and complexities they add.

Unfortunately for you, this means that you are saddled with an overly complex and data-heavy “one system to rule them all.” This leads to problems I’ve discussed elsewhere, such as the Frankenstack, the Hydra, and point pollution.

Here’s how to get your consolidated view of the customer without the top-heavy complexity

Fortunately, a consolidated view of the customer does not have to create a many-headed monster, nor does it have to lock you into a particular central platform.

The key lies in how data is accessed and shared among applications. In most CRMs, in order to access the data you need for a consolidated view, the data is imported into the CRM and thereafter “owned” by the CRM.

This creates needless complexity with other platforms, such as ERP and accounting systems. Data gets duplicated, platforms become dependent on integrations that can will fail and cause problems with each other, and the data can become corrupted.

Instead of focusing on data consolidation, which mainly serves the vendor and system integrators, change your focus to the visualization of the information needed to help your employees achieve the benefits outlined at the beginning of this article. Keep most of your data within the original systems and ensure that your teams can see it all in one place.

Within Membrain, for instance, our platform helps you paint a canvas of information from information stored in Membrain, but also from external sources without the need to move all data over to our database. For instance, you can design an page to quickly give salespeople an overview of what a customer has purchased from you in the past, the current sales goals, how you are helping them, who is involved, how active you have been, and much more. External data can be shown inside these pages while the originating platform retains its ownership. No data needs to be moved, as it only opens up a can of worms and never-ending IT spending.

If you need specific data to be in the CRM, very simple automated Google Sheet imports can be used to bridge information across multiple platforms without costly integrations and custom coding that easily breaks. This also reduces the need for expensive integrations projects and puts the power of a holistic view in the hands of salespeople faster.

In this way, the data remains secure within the platform that generated it, while the CRM provides the visual view of everything your people need to know.

Here’s what you DON’T need in a consolidated view

A consolidated view of the customer is not the same as putting every detail about a customer into one place. That said, a “360-degree view of a customer” is an oxymoron because if you add too much to the consolidated view, you soon will drown in data. For instance, if you create a view that shows everything that ever happened on an account, from social interactions to support tickets to invoices, you won’t be able to see what matters through the noise of everything else.

Furthermore, each role in your company has a need to see different types of information. Getting the right info - and only the right info - onto a single screen can be challenging.

This is another reason why it’s important not to buy into the “one system to rule them all” approach. Instead, embedded data and integrations that are one-directional and achievable without custom coding are the answer to quickly provide flexible, dynamic views that give each role what they need.

Obviously, I think Membrain is the right tool for creating consolidated customer views without the top-heavy total integration. I’d love to show you how simple, beautiful, and easy these views can be, so you can free yourself from the Hydra and achieve better results faster. Our partners can help you develop the integrated views you need, with the right data to help your teams make the decisions they need to make.