How to Achieve a 360-Degree View of Your Customer and Why it is so Important

Many businesses use disparate systems that don’t integrate intelligently. While this might seem harmless enough when your different systems work against each other, employees lack a quick, easy, and reliable way to get the information they need to get their jobs done. The customer experience suffers as a result. This can be problematic for a modern business when you consider that customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product. Instead, modern customers choose to support a business because of the experience they receive, and brands that cannot keep up will lose out.

Let’s imagine a customer calls their car insurer to alert them that they’ve had an accident. If all the relevant data about the accident is seamlessly fed into other systems across the business, it will be easier for the insurer to handle the situation properly, to process the claim as quickly as possible, and to provide a more personalized customer experience. Conversely, if this data is not shared with other departments in real-time, the same customer could get a call from the insurer’s marketing/sales department just hours after the accident offering them a better deal on their car insurance premium. A call that probably won’t be very well received.  
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Why a Lack of Integration Hampers Business Efficiency

Disparate systems cause confusion, delays, and frustration among your clients and your employees. This in turn affects efficiency, morale, and ultimately revenue. The question insurers need to ask themselves is what is stopping the business from achieving a 360-degree view of their customers?

• Disparate Sources

Businesses can only make intelligent decisions when they have relevant data; data that is integrated from multiple sources to provide a single, unified bird’s-eye view. But bringing together data from disparate sources can be a challenge. When data remains in different silos, no insights can be extracted from the data, rendering it useless for the purpose of deeper business analysis. The only thing worse than not having enough information is having an overflow of data that you cannot use. In this scenario, the business will not be able to leverage the data they have to drive business decisions, forcing them to be reactive, not proactive.

• Different Data Types

Even where systems are connected it can be an immense challenge to leverage these integrated systems to drive action and garner tangible insights from the data. It is important to remember that different databases collect data in different formats; think structured, unstructured and semi-structured. Integrating this data is a tedious process, especially if you do not have a proper integration tool in place.

• Forgetting to Plan for the Future

An often-overlooked need when it comes to data integration is making sure that you can adjust and evolve for future needs. Most solutions that integrate various systems and data focus on current state challenges and fail to anticipate future state needs like the ability to add more channels, systems, and teams to the mix as business units grow and as the enterprise evolves. Similarly, without flexibility and agility businesses run the risk of building solutions that quickly become outdated and no longer serve their purpose. For your IT teams and developers, this means going back to the drawing board and investing more time and money into building new solutions to solve old problems.

• Manual, Inefficient Processes

When businesses do not have the right tools in place to manage and understand their data, they often end up manually performing tasks that could easily be automated. This opens the door for errors and data inaccuracies. In addition to this, manual data consolidation is costly because it is incredibly time-intensive and, thus, costs a lot of money.  
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A Business Case for Data Integration

Having a 360-degree view of customers makes it possible to extend the capabilities of your sales and marketing teams. These teams can then build more strategic campaigns by using existing data to drive higher conversion rates and boost revenue. As mentioned in the personalized customer experience example earlier, delivering this is only possible when you have a holistic image of each and every customer. With proper data integration, businesses can use aggregated data to provide customers with more tailored experiences throughout the lifetime of their shopping journey.  

For instance, if you understand your customer’s buying behavior and needs, it is possible to reduce your marketing spend because you can cut down on duplicate campaigns. It all comes down to getting the right data, to the right person, at the right time. Synatic understands the importance of integrating customer data. This understanding allowed Synatic to work with Louisiana Workers’ Compensation Corporation (LWCC) to assist the state of Louisiana in its efforts to offer a full range of insurance services to its workforce. Working as an integration partner, we needed to build a solution that would provide LWCC with quick access to a consolidated view of their customers’ data in one place, providing LWCC insurance agents with a full 360-degree view of their clients when engaging with them.

Synatic’s Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP) enables an organization to eliminate application and data silos. By providing a data storage solution that can accommodate structured and unstructured, it allows data to be aggregated and synthesized before being loaded into the multiple systems where the information can be used. Synatic’s Dynamic platform is agile and enables businesses to rapidly adapt to changing business needs by giving businesses the ability to update workflows and add additional systems to existing flows.

Want to find out more about HIP? Click here to get in touch.  

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