Why Is This Important to Your Company? If you provide an environment that lets customers take advantage of the information you have about them to get things done, they are more likely to place increased value on their relationships with you.

Your Next Steps. Understand your customers’ primary scenarios in doing business with you, and find ways to provide them with actionable information that is meaningful to them.

Disney Provides a Travel Guide to Help Manage the End -to-End Event

© 2010 Patricia Seybold Group

Illustration 1. Disney’s travel guide provides 1) a map of the steps in the planning process, including an indication of what step you are on, 2) easy navigation to the former and next step, 3) quick tips to help you complete the guide, and 4) more detailed tips that will further assist you.

WHO NEEDS A 360-DEGREE VIEW? YOUR CUSTOMERS!

Most companies are still struggling to provide a comprehensive picture of each customer to everyone within their organization. Who is this person? How long have they been a customer? Which of our products and services have they used? When did they last have a problem? How well did we resolve it? What do they care about the most? What will they need or want next?

Even if your firm has done a good job of pulling all this information together across product lines and departments, do your customers have access to it?

Having a complete picture of your customer relationship isn’t enough unless you also provide this picture to the customer. Customers own both their relationships with you and their information. They have the right to access the information you have about them.

In fact, the best way to implement a system that provides a 360-degree view of customers’ relationships is to start by providing customers with a 360-degree view of their relationships with your company (and with relevant partners and stakeholders). Once customers have access to all the information they need about the services they are receiving from your organization, then your organization will also have that information. If you want good customer knowledge, you should gather, report, and maintain the information that customers care about, starting from the outside in.

If you make it easy for customers to access, update, organize, and enhance the information you have about them, you are primed to keep customers happy long term. If you provide an environment that lets customers take advantage of the information you have about them to get things done, they are more likely to think of you as their primary provider, and place increased value on their relationships with you.

Keeping track of customers’ contexts is not as simple as letting customers edit their profiles and see their order histories. Depending on what your customers are trying to achieve—their scenarios—providing a 360-degree view of the relationship may include consolidating information you never thought of as part of the customers’ relationships with you in ways you might not have considered.

Start with Three Fundamental Rules

To provide a complete 360-degree view of your customers’ relationship with you, you’ll want to:

1. “Remember” everything your company knows about each customer. Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than realizing that the person (or system) they are interacting with has no idea what has already taken place. Case in point, consider how annoying it is when you’ve punched in your account number on an IVR system, only to have the live representative to whom you have been routed ask you for your account number again. In fact, customers really want you to remember all their interactions with them through all touchpoints. If the last time the customer called, he was annoyed because a delivery was delayed, the next time he contacts your company, you should remember his irritation and ensure that the relationship is in a better place now.

2. Ensure that the customer can see the complete picture her way. It isn’t enough to hold the 360-degree view internally. Customers own their information and, therefore, need to be able to access it, modify it when appropriate, and organize it in ways meaningful to them. Just because your company maintains a list of products by SKU doesn’t mean that a customer wants to see the line item numbers for what she has bought; she may want to categorize by type of product or by date purchased, or by the project for which it was purchased.

3. Ensure that everyone in the company has access to the complete customer picture. Customers don’t want to be bounced from department to department to complete their agendas. Foster an atmosphere that values sharing customer information for the ultimate good of the customer and the organization.

These three principles are a good starting point. However, customers’ activities and relationships are never that simple, and there are lots of other factors that come into play.

Add Context by Identifying Which Scenarios Customers Are Doing

Depending on the situation in which the customer finds himself, and what he ultimately wants to accomplish, customers want to see their information in different ways. Customers’ context includes things like: “I need to complete this by next Friday before I go on vacation,” or “I can’t go over my planned budget of $2,000.”

Once you start looking for these scenarios, you’ll notice that there are at least three types:

1. Product Lifecycle-Based Scenarios. These are the activities that span the phases of a customer’s relationship with one of your products or services. The customer is either planning, exploring, selecting, buying, managing or maintaining, or renewing or replacing something.

2. Event-Triggered Scenarios. These are activities that relate to specific life events (birth of a baby, marriage, changing jobs) or business events (trade show, new product launch, office move, outfitting a new laboratory) that customers need to deal with.

3. Outcome-Based Scenarios. These are focused on a specific quantifiable outcome or goal. These outcome-based scenarios, whether personal (lose weight, learn a new skill, graduate from school) or professional (increase marketshare, get my paper published, close a big deal), are really short- or long-term projects.

Customers want a clear, complete picture of where they stand for each of these scenarios. Has my warranty run out? Is everything ready for us to install the new equipment in the lab? What do I need to do to lose that last 10 pounds?

PRODUCT LIFECYCLE CONTEXT

Maintain Context on All Products/Services I Have

Customers expect you to know everything about the products/services that they have purchased from you. As a customer, I expect providers to:

Provide information across all lifecycle phases for each product or service I have. This means that maintenance information, trouble tickets, upgrade or renewal information, support contracts, and all my interactions with your organization (such as inquiries, complaints, and compliments) are maintained and correlated. If I engaged in an online chat with a customer support representative while looking for information on replacing, say, a power cord, the content of that chat should be associated with me and the product for which the cord is necessary.

Provide information about my stuff across all product lines and business units. It isn’t enough to simply maintain lifecycle information by product. As a customer, I want you to know all the products and services I have bought from you regardless of type of product or business unit from which I bought it. I don’t care how your company is organized; to me, it is all the same. If I buy hardware and application software from you, I expect you to know that. Organizations such as retail banks do a pretty good job of this, providing a single view of all accounts, including mortgages, credit cards, and investments, which are typically handled by different groups within the financial institution.

Enable any customer-facing employee to provide one-stop help across functional departments and products. Don’t just do a “sorry, not my department” transfer to someone else. And when you do have to transfer, be sure to make it a warm, human interaction, in which the first employee includes all the context up until the transfer. Here is a place where U.S. banks still have some work to do; although general customer service tends to be excellent, as soon as you request some action be taken on a loan application, a mortgage, etc., you are immediately transferred and often left hanging (since these specialized departments often don’t seem to provide 24x7 support).

Enable customers to see and organize or categorize their information. Some phone customers want all of their telephone calls consolidated. Others want to organize calls by client, geography or project. Again, let’s use financial institutions as a good example. My credit card companies all offer me categorized views of my spending each month or over a specified time period. I can also reorganize the view based on these categories. Many financial institutions let you create your own categories, such as Kitchen Renovation or Product Launch 2010.

The ability to view and organize information was particularly useful to both Patty and me as each of us prepared our U.S. income tax submissions. Our different credit card companies and banks provide a yearly view of all of our expenditures categorized by type: travel, dining, lodging, healthcare, etc. The ability to add your own categories for tagging contributions is really important at tax time, particularly when those tags are “learned” and applied to donations made to the same institutions year after year. This really assisted us in successfully reaching our shared event-triggered scenario goal of “I want to easily prepare my tax returns and submit them at least one month before the deadline.”

Consider My (or My Company’s) Products Across All Lines of Business

Product and service providers also need to take this cross product line/business unit context into consideration when providing a 360-degree view of the customer context. Customers expect you to:

Recognize all my business across MY business units. Just as I want you to know all that I have bought from you across your product lines and business units, I want you to recognize all the business that other departments or business units in my organization have done with your company as a whole. If my organization does a lot of business with yours, even though many different business units are involved on both sides, I still expect to be viewed as a single customer relationship with all the benefits, such as negotiated pricing discounts, attached.