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Customer watch
Even capturing all points of customer contact misses some critical dimensions.
IN THE EVOLVING world of customer relationship management (CRM), we're hearing more and more about the importance of viewing the customer comprehensively. It is possible now to capture information about all points of contact between a customer and the marketing organization. This is a powerful concept for understanding and managing customers, but it may still be seriously deficient and on-tit key sources of information critical to successful growth strategies. To avoid this myopia, companies must move away from a one-dimensional view of customers to understand the complete multidimensional sphere of customer activity.
The 360-Degree View
Information technology makes it possible to capture customer-level information at all points where the customer touches the provider organization. For example, a bank can know about all products a customer owns (e.g., loans, deposits, services), determine how frequently customers interact with the bank via each channel (e.g., branch, telephone, Web), and evaluate the interaction experiences (e.g., customer satisfaction measures, response to targeted promotions, changes in account activity, movement of assets). This perspective is sometimes referred to as the 360-degree view of the customer because it ties together disparate interactions for the same individual in a virtual circle.
Clearly this is desirable because it helps a marketer treat the customer holistically, based on the total relationship, tailoring offers and pricing based on prior observed behavior and the overall value of the customer. This is far preferable to a siloed view that looks at product, promotions, or channels in isolation, without regard to how the customer is treated across all these dimensions. The siloed view can lead to strategies that maximize one dimension (e.g., sales of one particular product), while sacrificing customer total relationship value, which might be driven by several other products.
It's backward-looking. Unfortunately, what is portrayed as the comprehensive view of customers is often only a one-dimensional, partial view and may be seriously limited. First, it may be solely retrospective, good for understanding past behavior, but at the expense of anticipating future customer priorities. For example, knowledge that...