Do your customers know more about you than you do about them? In the new social economy, they often do. They also know more about your competition and have more precise expectations of service.

If the customer-facing people in your company don’t share the same perspective as the customer, you probably don’t either. This means you can’t see the customer’s needs clearly, you can’t meet them, and you can’t stop customers from leaving.

To gain much needed insights and solve these problems, you need a new perspective—what’s called One View of the Customer. More than simply sharing information across departments, One View of the Customer means:

• The people who need to understand your customer have the right information they need exactly when they need it.
• Marketing shares data with customer service, who shares data with sales. Everyone shares data.
• You apply powerful analytics to your customer data in order to understand customer behavior and make those insights visible to everyone.
• You adopt strong social listening practices.

Good-bye data silos; hello, shared knowledge

Data silos are a big problem. They create a fragmented point of view, they tend to isolate people from each other, and they prevent employees from pulling in valuable resources across departments. There’s also the danger of having different silos providing entirely different service levels or simply not having the same customer information. It’s easy to see how silos kill the customer experience.

Solving this problem means making sure that when customer service learns from a service call, it’s entered into the shared CRM, such as Microsoft Dynamics 365. When marketing captures information from a gated content campaign, sales and other departments can see it and potentially act on it. Sales pulls and adds customer information shared with everyone else.

Making knowledge about customers available in such an accessible way has another advantage in a customer-centric organization. By pulling information from across a range of formerly siloed sources, the company creates a new, previously unseen perspective. No single silo had such a clear view of the customer before; now the entire company does.

Unified data & analytics

Smart analytics are increasingly able to generate insights into customers’ habits, points of view and even future buying needs. However, to use analytics to their full potential, companies must change the way departments think about their roles and the fundamental way data is stored, handled, and shared.

When data is walled off, it’s hard to make it visible. Keeping it in separate systems for different departments means that people who need it can’t get it—and neither can the analytical tools that help make sense out of it.

Data visibility is important to data-driven decision-making. When your data is walled off, so is the power of your analytics to generate relevant insights. However, when you use business intelligence to parse customer data from every available source, you return insights that show how best to serve your customers–even entire industries. You have the opportunity to build a world-class sales organization.

Strongly social

To get to world-class levels, companies must truly become customer-driven. You must listen hard to the actual customers, learning how they behave, what they buy and how they buy. Social media channels are rich with knowledge about your customer. The more you understand that, the better you will be able to tailor your offerings to your customer’s needs. In addition to creating teams of skilled social media users, this means using a variety of tools to capture that data, process it, and make it actionable.

Rely on Altruas, your trusted CRM expert

With Microsoft Dynamics 365, you can create a One View of the Customer across your company and meet each customer’s needs in a meaningful, unified, exceptional way. Your trusted advisors at Altruas will help you design and implement a CRM solution that helps break down silos and allows data and analytics to be shared across your organization. And our commitment to your success means we’ll put your interest first—all the time, every time. Contact us today.