The Answer to 360 Customer View Isn’t CRM, It’s Intelligent Search

Customers contact you mainly for one of two reasons. Either they have a problem that needs to be solved, or they have a question that needs to be answered. This is true whether they are contacting you for commercial or technical reasons.

Every time a customer reaches out, your relationship with them hangs in the balance. It hinges on your ability to provide immediate answers and solutions that are immediately relevant to that customer.

If your call center agent must tell the customer to call someone else, or talk to a different department, that creates friction. You risk damaging the customer relationship. In some cases, you may even lose them to the competition.

The key to building strong customer relationships is to answer their questions and solve their problems. Promptness is crucial. The best solutions are reached in the first conversation you have with them.

Your call center’s effectiveness depends on having the right data. But data alone is not enough. You also need a way to leverage your data to gain a 360-degree view of your customers.

What is a 360 customer view?

A 360 customer view gathers all the information about every customer in one place. Basic contact information is just a starting point. It can also include purchase history, customer service experiences, and social media interactions.

In short, it combines all of their interactions, shopping, and preferences. It tracks each individual customer journey with your brand across channels, devices, and other contact points.

A 360 customer view allows you to answer customer questions and solve problems almost instantly. That’s because you have tracked all these customer touch points to create a unified digital profile of each customer. That gives you a complete picture of every customer’s current circumstances. It’s a roadmap to providing them with an exceptional customer experience .

The typical approach is to try doing this through your CRM. It often involves creating an ever-more complex environment with more applications.

The problem is that your CRM won’t put together these billions of data points for you. It only aggregates data. It doesn’t deliver true insights.

Call center agents don’t have the capability to wade through volumes of data on every individual customer. What they need is a way to find useful information instantly.

CRM alone is not enough to build a true 360 customer view.

Instead of more data, what call center agents really need is actionable insights. They need to be able to know and understand each customer, in order to better serve them.

No matter how much data you collect about each customer, you need a way to use that data to solve their problems and fulfill their needs.

In today’s highly competitive marketplace, you need to provide a true 360 customer view. But a CRM is not enough to deliver it. CRM won’t push useful insights to the surface, where they can be seen and acted upon.

An effective 360 customer view requires intelligent search.

Intelligent search is faster and better than CRM at leveraging all the knowledge you have about your customer.

Intelligent search goes deeper than the structured data used by CRM. It also allows searching unstructured data , such as emails, live chat, survey responses, business documents, technical documentation, or other information that doesn’t fit neatly into a database. It can retrieve data from many different sources and applications.

But gathering all that data together is only part of the story. The critical difference is that intelligent search can then analyze it to make sense of it all.

Using deep learning technology, intelligent search analyzes structured and unstructured data . It can identify relevant information that should be shown to the call center agent, and then surface that information when needed.

After all, the goal is not only to gather the data and aggregate it, but to analyze the data in order to deliver useful information. By analyzing the content, intelligent search connects the dots instantly.

It transforms raw data into actionable information for the call center agent. It gives them everything they need to best act on a customer’s question, problem, or request. That provides you with an effective 360 customer view to serve your customers better than the competition.

Intelligent search improves metrics across the board.

Intelligent search delivers the best response time of any solution on the market. It analyzes customer data and displays information to the agent in less than a second.

Agents can preview information without ever having to disconnect from an application to open the source document. That can dramatically improve agent response times.

Because of this Google-like experience, user adoption is faster and easier than most applications. The time to proficiency is faster. Call center agents can become autonomous quickly, which increases efficiency.

This ease of use creates a shorter learning curve. As the right tool for the job, intelligent search makes teams more effective and improves metrics across the board.

Customers are better served, and job satisfaction rises. Agents feel good at doing their jobs. That leads directly to reduced turnover in call center staffing.

Real-world intelligent search use cases are everywhere.

Intelligent search offers organizations in any industry the ability to build a true 360 customer view. That’s a necessary step to providing superior service.

• A telecommunication company uses intelligent search to answer more than 90% of customer questions. That leaves their customers more satisfied. At the same time, average call duration is reduced, freeing up opportunities for upselling.
• An aerospace company uses intelligent search so that customer support can answer technical questions. It allows them to gather together all of the information they need to provide useful answers to each unique customer, which reduces time to resolution and improves outcomes.
• A banking company uses intelligent search to handle all of their customers’ end-to-end needs. It helps them not only address their customers’ current concerns, but also anticipate their future needs. This helps improve customer retention and reduce customer attrition to competitors.
• A retail company uses intelligent search to match a 360 customer view with a 360 product view. By analyzing both customer data and enterprise data, they can cross-reference every customer’s purchase history and the stock at their favorite store to suggest new products and upsell to customers.