Know your customer. It should be the mantra of almost any subscription-based business.
With every touchpoint and billing cycle, you’re creating a potential treasure trove of customer data, but you need to be able to collect and analyze customer data to reach that holy grail: the 360-degree customer view.
It’s much easier said than done. As Chuck Schaeffer points out for Customer Think, “fewer than 10% of companies have a 360-degree customer view, and only about 5% are able to use this view to systematically grow their business.”
There are many definitions of the 360-degree customer view, and some would argue that it is almost impossible to have everything. But there are 5 general types of data
that need to be collected:
- Customer Demographic Data
- Customer Transaction Data
- Customer Environmental Data
- Customer Behavioral Data
- Social Data
When people talk about companies using “Big Data”—the buzziest of buzzwords—this is essentially what they’re talking about. Payment data is crucial to any business looking for a 360-degree view, providing the Transaction data that allows for insights that subscription businesses need. Chargent can help keep all your transaction data in Salesforce, where it’s organized and available for analysis and insight that ultimately helps increase your revenue. Payments and other financial systems should no longer be in separate silos, so by moving them to Salesforce you not only make billing operations more efficient, but also increase the data available for that whole-customer understanding within Salesforce.
Know your customers, keep them happy
Where are your customers coming from? How can you keep them coming back? Which subscribers might be ready to upgrade their service? You can’t grow your business without knowing your clients, and that can be difficult when you have thousands. After all, every customer is a unique snowflake, right?
The goal is to offer a personalized customer experience, but that’s almost impossible if your data is spread across different platforms and pulled from varying payment
terminals. Chargent does the heavy lifting on the payments and billing side, organizing your data right in Salesforce, where it’s easy to analyze and turn into a holistic view of the customer, idiosyncrasies and all.
T-Mobile is a company that hasn’t been shy about how it uses a 360-view to keep its customers happy. They took an aggressive approach to data collection and analysis to get a better sense of the subscriber’s that were thinking of cancelling, and according to reports, T-Mobile USA cut its churn rate in half. For any subscription business, a change like that has massive implications.
Customer alignment is crucial
I know; I just told you that every customer is like a snowflake. But when dealing withthousands of them or more, businesses need a practical way to group them intocustomer segments. The key, though, is doing so as accurately as possible. AsSchaeffer writes, “A 360 view maps each customer into customer segments toallocate resourcing and align business processes based on customer contributionto other business drivers.” That way, each segment can get the individualized engagement it needs.
Over in Finland—a place that knows it’s snowflakes well—there’s a gaming agency using a 360-customer view to detect possible gambling addicts (how’s that for a customer segment?). According to Forbes, Veikkaus uses real-time data from both online and in-person betting to create customer profiles for bettors.
“Our data platform provides a much better and more accurate view of who might be a problematic gambler and based on that data can make a much better decision about what kind of activities we should do or stop doing,” their CIO told Forbes.
So if a Finnish gambling company can sift through two million transactions a day and spot gambling addicts with a 360-view, your company can probably find the customers ready for an upgrade. If you know how certain types of customers will react to a certain company actions, you can develop a better plan of action for each scenario, ultimately giving you
A 360 view into the future
The 360-degree customer view also allows for predictive analytics. On a macro level, it offers confidence about sales numbers and limits uncertainty. At the micro level, itcan help a company better understand how a customer segment will react tothings like marketing plays and changes in subscriber benefits.
Chargent makes your data easy to run through all the analysis that you need to gauge future outcomes. “The ability to learn and predict customer responses to company actions,” Schaeffer writes, “will increase new customer acquisitions, customer share and customer retention.”
It’s pretty clear why all kinds of companies are chasing after that 360-degree customer view. But none of it is possible without the right kind of data in the right place. And that’s one of the things that you get with Chargent.
