Rapid business transformation starts with the 360-degree customer view

Written by Joe Green (Tech HQ Author) and Richard Kao (Senior Director of Product Marketing at Jitterbit)
16 February 2021 | 3196 Shares

Source: Shutterstock

How is an artist meant to paint a lifelike portrait without seeing their subject properly? A painting done while the model sits in a half-light is never going to capture a true likeness, yet many organizations expect to understand their customers without being able to “see” them properly.

Of course, in business customer terms, “seeing” comes about by using all the different pieces of digital information that the organization holds on each of their clients and prospects. But there are two significant problems that companies have in establishing a 360-degree view of the customer, stumbling blocks that come from the same source:

– Data is held in silos, locked away in the different applications an organization runs, typically defined by the Departments or Divisions of the company: Sales, Marketing, Finance, Operations, Support, and so on.

– It’s difficult to pool all the available information on any single customer or prospect, and doing so is a manual, time-consuming process that doesn’t scale.

There is a good deal more detail than this article could dive into here – such as applications and services being hosted in different clouds or using different formats and schema – but the key problems above remain the headline acts in this context.

Why the 360-degree view matters

The expectations of today’s consumers or buyers in B2B contexts are set very high. In part, that’s thanks to the data giants such as Google and Uber setting the bar a long way up. These days, any company supplying goods or services has to meet each customer’s expectations of a personalized, carefully-crafted experience.

But those without Google’s or Uber’s funding levels (that is, the rest of us) know that creating high-quality, hyper-personalized customer experiences is all but impossible at scale because at no stage is there a clear picture of the individual customer.

That’s where Jitterbit comes in. Its platform is designed to integrate the different systems in the organization with one another and automate the business processes between them. For many organizations with complex landscapes of applications and services, that might seem like a hugely complicated process to achieve. But Jitterbit makes it easy.

Furthermore, the platform has one single result firmly in sight: the 360-degree view of the customer. The all-round view of the customer means organizations can innovate and build relevant and timely products and services, because staff are no longer mired in manually re-keying data from system to system, copying & pasting, and waiting for processes to catch up.

The discrete parts

In any organization, there is information on each lead, customer, brand-advocate, or prospect. But depending on where and when each person has “touched” the business, the data is held in different places.

Marketing teams may hold a wealth of information on what content is consumed on a cloud-based SaaS, Sales teams have the same person recorded in CRM systems, Finance has issued invoices to them before, and Customer Care team’s platforms hold a long history that details a person’s likes, preferences, and opinions.

Jitterbit Harmony is a packaged solution that quickly and easily integrates these systems and more, with a minimum of technical overheads.

That’s achieved by the company’s library of standard connectors and connectivity tools, like “Connector Builder” or APIM that enable you to build reusable connectivity to almost every conceivable business application. In addition to the connectivity resources available, the platform provides access to a huge range of pre-built process templates designed with businesses and organizations like yours in mind.

The readymade templates automate the integrated business processes, removing the manual piecing together of the customer “portrait,” throwing light onto each individual that’s been in contact with the organization in whatever form.

Like the artist suddenly able to see his or her model in studio-quality lighting, the Jitterbit platform enables organizations to create a complete view of every customer at any scale.

Conclusion and what’s next

In the next article in this series, we’ll be looking in more depth at the Jitterbit integration and automation platform with particular reference to that creation of 360-degree views of the customer and employee: how this is achieved, and the advantages and positive effects for the business. We will also learn from real-life users of Jitterbit on just how impactful the platform has been in their organizations.

Check back here in a few weeks for the next instalment, but in the meantime, we highly recommend you download and read this eBook7 Guidelines for Customer Data Integration” [PDF] for insights into where the all-round view can lead your business.