A unified customer profile view is a holistic view of customers’ information. Let’s look at how brands can leverage it to create engaging CX, add personalisation and improve CSAT.

Customer service is all about customers. Organisations that keep customers at the centre perform better than those that don’t. 

Being customer-centric means knowing your customers better and keeping them engaged, smartly. Basically, getting a 360-degree view of customers. In customer support it includes understanding your customers to anticipate their needs and preferences, responding quicker and creating personalised responses at different points of the buying journey. 

When done right, customer-centric actions can lead to meaningful experiences. For one, customers value personalisation from brands they interact with. Second, delightful and friction-less CX leads to trust and trust leads to loyalty. So in the long run, organisations that are customer-centric acquire and retain more customers. 

But the question is how do you become customer-centric and build smarter engagement? The answer is: leveraging the Unified Customer Profile view. 

What is unified customer profile view? 

A unified customer profile view is a comprehensive view of customers’ data. In this profile, you can see customers’ basic information such as name, email ID, phone number, location, etc., their past purchase orders, previous chat or call history, etc. In short, everything about a customer since they first started interacting with your business. 

A unified customer profile view is made of their past, present and future interactions. 

• Past: a digestible view of customers’ history – their previous interactions and purchase history. 
• Present: current data on customers, where they are chatting/calling from, context of the query, previous agent’s notes (if handover to multiple agents), etc. 
• Future: information on customer’s behaviour. If there is an upsell or cross-sell opportunity, if the customer is likely to churn, etc.  

A unified customer profile view is all about pulling pieces of information on the customer from different places and stitching them together to get relevant and specific information that can be used to deliver delightful experiences. That is, bringing all your customer data under one roof. 

Businesses can build unified customer profile view by integrating their conversational platform with their:

• CRM and ticketing tools: Zendesk, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Mailchimp; 
• Marketing software: Clevertap, Webengage, 
• Payment channels: Razorpay, CCAvenue; 
• Messaging channels: WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Viber;
• Other apps: Shopify, Magento, Zapier, etc. 

Because of these integrations, the customer profile is updated automatically after every interaction your business has with a customer.  

Why is unified customer profile important? 

Customer data provides context to interactions and reduces gaps in communication.  

By leveraging data on customers, businesses can create smart engagement strategies and enhance customer experience. 

Over the course of time, this data grows. And thanks to the wealth of data available on customers, businesses can provide a unified customer experience across channels and touchpoints. 

A comprehensive customer profile equips businesses to create more engaging customer experiences, run relevant and targeted outreach campaigns and improve customer satisfaction. The five biggest benefits your businesses can see are: 

1. Deliver quick response
2. Add personalisation
3. Enhance AI’s performance
4. Facilitate cross department communication
5. Send relevant outreach campaigns

1. Deliver quick response

Customers want speedy responses to their queries. A HubSpot research shows that 90% of customers say an immediate response is an important factor when they seek support. 60% of these customers defined “immediate” as less than 10 mins.

With the help of a unified customer profile view, support agents get context on customer conversations and can respond quicker. They don’t have to toggle between tools to fetch data.

A 360-degree customer profile solves another problem. A Forrester research found that 42% of agents couldn’t efficiently solve customer queries due to a lack of customer information. Comprehensive customer data provides agents with information that helps them make quick decisions and resolve customer queries efficiently. 

Ultimately, comprehensive customer profiles enhance agent and customer experiences at the same time. 

2. Add personalisation

Customers want personalisation. A Salesforce Research showed that 63% of consumers expect B2C businesses to know their needs and expectations. For B2B, this number is 76%. According to another report (Accenture), 91% of customers are more likely to shop with brands that offer them relevant recommendations. 

A unified customer profile view is the foundation for personalisation.

A holistic customer view gives a company a complete picture of customers’ purchase history, pages they visited on the website, previous chat conversations, channels on which conversations took place, etc. Based on this data, you can personalise your automated interactions with them, providing relevant information at the right time, right place. 

3. Enhance AI’s performance

Analysing historic data provides us with information that positions us to see patterns and prepares us to make better decisions in the future. This is amplified for an AI. 

An integrated customer profile allows AI to predict customers’ behaviour and their future needs. Finding patterns in data helps businesses resolve issues before they arise. Data on customers also help AI train itself and respond to customers accurately.  

With this data-driven approach, businesses can use conversational AI to customer experience up to one notch. 

4. Facilitate cross department communication

A customer moves through the marketing, sales and support departments depending on their stage in buying journey. Most of the time, there is a gap in transferring information from one team to another. Data loss can also happen when customers move from one channel to another. 

A unified customer profile aligns sales, marketing and support teams, across channels. 

By sharing a 360-degree view of customers means all departments are on the same page and the relevant information is passed on seamlessly. In other words, unified customer profile views eliminate silos and fragmentation of data. 

Sales and marketing departments can use this data for upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Support representatives can view information from sales and marketing to understand their journey. A win-win situation for everyone involved. 

5. Send relevant outreach campaigns

Outreach campaigns work best when they are sent to targeted audiences. With a unified customer profile, you can create better audience segmentation and hence, create more strategic campaigns. 

Based on customers’ behaviour you can send them alerts, notifications, updates, reminders, invites, etc. With relevant information, customers feel more valued and loyal to your brand.  

Outreach campaigns are important for businesses as they keep customer engagement active. With detailed customer profiles and targeted campaigns, businesses can increase customer interaction, get more responses from them and see higher conversion rates.  

Closing thoughts

Businesses are competing over customer experiences and meeting customer expectations. You need to provide personalisation and relevant content to create authentic and humanised connections.

A unified customer profile view can improve your interactions with customers and deliver better experiences at different points in the customer journey. This has a direct impact on customer satisfaction and retention. 

Verloop.io is a leading conversational AI provider for customer support. We integrate with 100+ tools to provide a unified customer profile view that facilitates better communication, quick responses, personalised messages and targeted campaigns. To see how it works, talk to our team.