Customer 360

CHAPTER 2How the Customer 360 Approach Provides Value

If you were watching during our Formula 1 360 race, you noticed we mentioned a couple of significant technology investments—in their case, a CDP and an RTIM system. Combined with some other improvements, retraining, professional services, and new hires, the costs of providing a better end-to-end customer experience can be significant. How significant depends on what you have already, where you’re going, your timeline, and so on—but there’s no denying that a business case is required.

How do you do this? How does something as amorphous as “a better customer experience” translate into dollars and sense?

Customer 360 sits in the pistons of industry, right in the heart of your engine. This combination of technologies and services—integrated as a platform—can be described as piping or plumbing; ingesting data locked up in homegrown and various vendor data stores; organizing that data (harmonization, identify management) and enriching it; and making it available for the newest members of your customer-facing teams to analyze and use.

Customer 360 builds a “single view of the customer,” which is powerful if not complete. CDPs are not usually bought as a system of record, like the (much) pricier enterprise data warehouse (EDW) or master data management (MDM) systems. (We talk more about the role of various data stores in the enterprise in Chapter 9.) They are a tool designed to be used by customer-facing teams including service ...