Let us connect the thread from where we left off in our last blog and introduce you to the concept of Customer 270. {For more details, refer here}

What is Customer 270?

Simply put, Customer 270 is akin to an iceberg – what you see is an incomplete picture.

customer 270

Companies in the past few years have invested heavily in IT infrastructure giving them the capability to capture and store customer data from both internal and external sources. But now, the challenge for companies is to analyze the data captured to get actionable insights which will help them to get a competitive advantage in the market. Unless done properly, the investments made in IT infrastructure will not give the desired returns.

Customer 270 View

customer 270 view

What are the challenges with Customer 270?

While customer level data is getting captured, it is not getting shared across all departments in the company. Different units are not sharing data, as they are unable to see the value in doing so. They may not realize it immediately, but sub-optimal decisions are being made due to the lack of data.

Suppose in a hotel, the Revenue Management department does not talk to the Promotions/Marketing department. Can you imagine the resultant problems? Revenue Managers will never get to know which Promotions are able to attract the maximum number of customers, and in turn give maximum ROI.

Enter Customer 360

What companies need today is to create a Customer 360 view. Customer 360 is about connecting data, not collecting data.
Imagine: A loyal customer calls your call center, to book a standard room. Can you possibly upsell, nudge her to a more premium room?

Yes you can!!

All you need is customer level data:

  • Transactional data to study the past stay pattern – What kind of rooms has she stayed at in the past
  • Psychographic data to understand her attitude or reaction towards an upsell offer
  • Income profile to know if she can afford a higher grade room
  • Past preference data to know about her likes and dislikes
  • Past customer service data to know what kind of room and service she prefers

Insights from the above data will surely help in making personalized, and hence more effective, upsell offers.

There are several benefits of establishing a Customer 360 view. To name a few:

  • Take guesswork out. Once you have a comprehensive view (remember the iceberg?), you can make much more informed and confident decisions.
  • Improve Marketing ROI. Now that you have a well-rounded customer view, you can optimize your Marketing dollars; it is easier to focus on the right set of customers and to share marketing communication most relevant to them through their preferred medium. This leads to huge benefits both in terms of top-line growth and bottom-line impact.
  • Improve collaboration. This is a soft aspect often ignored. A basic level of collaboration across departments is a necessity to get things “off the ground”. Once department heads see the benefits of sharing information, silos break, people talk, ideas flow… and guess what? Value gets unlocked. CEOs will be joyous as innovation and sharing of best practices keeps improving.

In a large multi-billion dollar hotel chain, the front desk and the call center operations were seen to be working fairly independently with limited (almost zero) visibility of the overall customer behavior. After adopting the Customer 360 framework, the hotel chain realized incremental revenues of $2-3 million while maintaining the same Marketing spends. Once the impact became clear, the collaboration across the different units became easier. Now the same hotel chain is actively breaking the silos across the firm and ensuring that the wider organization has access to its well-rounded customer personas.

For more details on how to go about building a Customer 360 view, watch out for our next blog.

Authored by Dr. Anil Kaul – CEO and co-founder Absolutdata &   Rahul Sood – Hospitality Analytics Enthusiast and Manager at Absolutdata 

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