What exactly is a “360-degree view of the customer”?

The term a “360-degree view of the customer” has been used in the industry for several years.  But what exactly does it mean, and what information would you actually display on the agent desktop?

We asked our panel of experts for their opinion.

Whenever a customer interacts with an organisation, it is vital that the richness of information available on that customer informs and guides the processes that will help to maximise their experience, while simultaneously making the interaction as effective and efficient as possible. This includes everything from avoiding repetition or rekeying of information, to viewing customer history, establishing context and initiating desired actions.

A true 360-degree view needs to include views of the past, present and future:

• The past means providing a meaningful and easily digested view of the customer’s history. This includes product or policy activity, interaction history across all channels, including community, recent product views, campaign activity and process history.
• The present requires presenting key customer information about who they are and how they relate to your organisation, but also requires determining the context of the call. Is there a recent order or current fault, why are they interacting with us now?
• The future relates to actions that can be initiated to guide the future of the relationship. Is the customer likely to churn? Are there up-sell or cross-sell opportunities or targeted messages to bring in at this time?

Delivering on the 360-degree view is not simply about having a unified database of all activity, but rather being able to pull together the pieces of information that are relevant for a specific customer and specific interaction into an intuitive workspace for the agent or the customer.

In terms of specific information, the 360-degree view should feed into all customer interactions, including those that relate to self-service, but a good example is that moment in the call centre, at the start of a conversation, when the agent has just established the caller’s identity. With a 360-degree view, this identity is used to generate a rich picture of the customer in real time and give the agent an instant snapshot regarding the background to the call. This snapshot should include:

• Identity: name, location, gender, age
• Relationships: influence, connections, associations
• Current activity: orders, faults, deliveries, etc.
• History: contacts, campaigns, processes, cases across all lines of business and channels
• Value: which products or services they are associated with, including history
• Flags: prompts to give context, e.g. churn propensity, up-sell options, fraud risk, mood of last interactions, fault record, frequency of contact
• Actions: expected, likely or essential actions based on who they are and the fact they are calling now

Steven Thurlow

Ultimately, the 360-degree view is the very least that a customer expects of an organisation. They are not concerned with the internal departmental, line of business, political or system silos that all businesses have. They simply see one enterprise; it is vital that organisations see them and serve them just as clearly; this is a basic foundation for delivering a good customer experience.

It is worth noting that it is just as important for an organisation to have a 360-degree view of itself. This means using customer feedback and meaningful process performance information, as well as underlying transactional reports, to give a healthy view of agent performance and to help target improvements in processes in addition to training and coaching.

Steven Thurlow is CTO at Sword Ciboodle (www.sword-ciboodle.com)

Enabling call centre agents to access detailed customer information quickly and easily – known as gaining an integrated, ‘360° view’ – is becoming a core focus of leading call centres. An effective, integrated customer view puts both information and the ability to act at the agent’s fingertips. This provides savings in the form of shorter hold times, better call resolution, ensured compliance, and reduced agent training time, as well as revenue from better sales conversions and on-boarding completion.

New technologies are making this an achievable goal for any contact centre, large or small.

Gaining control of your applications

Call centres are now able to merge relevant customer data into a common 360° view from the applications they have on hand, without costly server-side solutions, custom code, or custom interfaces. This enables call centre agents to make the most of the applications already available.

It’s also possible to incorporate customer data from other key contact centre technologies – such as the ACD, IVR, diallers, email, chat, self-service, case management, and the like into a core application such as Siebel CRM.

Assembling this information makes for a knowledgeable, efficient agent. But the best outcomes can happen by also arming the agent with a set of desktop action tools as part of the same deployment.

Info + action for agents – the 360° custom tool bar

The best way to understand this new way of assembling a 360° customer view and turning it into action is to look at a representative solution for an agent desktop. This custom application bar took approximately a day to develop and deploy.

Key:

A – Customer Information; integrate desktop applications to:

• automatically access and display all relevant customer data on-screen, triggered by the incoming phone number
• automatically synchronise the customer data across all key applications, so that changes made in the tool bar are made in all applications
• automatically extract data from an external Web service to retrieve and display other required customer data (e.g. credit scoring) on the agent desktop, and automatically incorporate into on-boarding automations

B – Automated Agent Tasks (in this example, involving on-boarding, compliance); using the same integration to:

• share customer data with different applications to generate required documentation – print and digital
• establish self-service account access for the customer – set-up, password generation
• automatically execute and log customer on-boarding tasks

C – Agent Preferences. Allows the agent to selectively hide and display applications for a more efficient desktop environment.

Francis Carden

Specific implementations will vary, but the solution is possible for almost every contact centre application ecosystem, business flow and customer requirement.

Contact centres around the globe in many verticals – financial services, retail, insurance, and telecommunications, and others – are realising both savings and revenue from this unique approach to a 360° customer view, combining true access to data with an ability to execute on the spot. The solution provides:

• maximum efficiency of customer service and other key agent tasks
• back-office functions to the front lines
• ensured compliance
• minimal new agent training times and reduces turnover

And with solutions built and returning investment in weeks and months, not years.

Francis Carden is Founder and Chief Evangelist, OpenSpan (www.openspan.com)

The key to being truly effective is to deliver only the most relevant information to the user at the most relevant point in the interaction.  And such relevance is dependent upon not only the role that the individual employee plays – for example, call centre agent compared to compliance officer – but also must be appropriate to where, within the interaction, the particular data is required.

It must be recognised, of course, that there are certain key pieces of data that will be required throughout the process.   Such ‘core’ information is likely to include:

• Customer name – including salutation preference if known
• Customer reason for calling – if captured via the IVR or during conversation
• Business intent for this interaction – what does the business want to achieve
• Customer current value to the business
• Outstanding work requests for this customer
• “Hot Topics/Flags” – e.g. has the customer recently complained, are they a VIP, etc.
• Instant access to customer data – including products or services purchased, internal processes, policies, knowledge and interaction history

Yet to ensure that the 360-degree view is delivering what the agent and customer requires at every stage of the interaction, this process must be dynamic, constantly changing the information required.  This may reflect a number of factors in the customer relationship, such as:

• Different service propositions based upon customer value – for example, do ‘gold’ customers get a two-day SLA compared to a three-day SLA applicable to ‘silver’ customers?
• The customer’s product portfolio – what products or services do they already have and, more importantly, what products are they likely to purchase?
• The most relevant offers applicable to this customer – identifying and driving appropriate up-sell and cross-sell activities

Bryn Standrin

In our experience, this often creates the problem of information overload – bombarding the agent with large volumes of unnecessary information.  This increases the agent’s workload to no purpose.

What agents really need is to be able to access the detailed data, within a consistent, intuitive and rapid screen.

In short, the maxim ‘less is more’ is highly appropriate here.  The most effective 36- degree customer view reflects only the most relevant data directly related to the process in which the agent is engaged at any one time.  The key is in having access to the right data – and only the right data – at the right time, in the right place.

Bryn Standrin is Business Consultant – Contact Centres at Pegasystems (www.pega.com)

Why isn’t a 360-degree view the panacea that the CRM companies have been promising for the last decade?

Because it isn’t really a 360-degree view of the customer that’s needed by your customer service agents.

Ever since their first appearance in the 1990s, CRM systems have promised much and delivered less.  Even for those organisations that beat the odds and had a successful implementation, the call centre’s perspective was that CRM just created another application that the agents had to navigate around and enter data into.

Guy Tweedale

Information overload can cause as many problems as having too little!  Even though all the information about the customer may be contained within one application, the way agents must navigate around the various screens is misaligned with the way a customer call naturally flows.

And the more information that’s held, the more screens the agent is likely to need to look at per call.  This can disrupt the call flow and slow the whole process down.

360-degree thinking is so last century… it’s all about intelligent, intuitive views these days.

Give agents the necessary intelligent, context-sensitive view of the customer as opposed to a 360-degree view.

GuyTweedale is Senior Vice President, European Operations of Jacada (www.jacada.com)