A Maturity Model for Customer Centricity Maximizing Customer Loyalty, Revenue and Wallet Share through a 360 Degree View of the Customer An Attivio White Paper
Jul 09, 2015
A Maturity Model for Customer Centricity
Maximizing Customer Loyalty, Revenue and Wallet Share
through a 360 Degree View of the Customer
An Attivio White Paper
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Introduction: Back to the Future of Customer Retention & Repeat Business
“The purpose of business is to get and keep a customer.”
“Today knowledge has power. It controls access to opportunity...”
– Peter Drucker
These two quotes from Peter Drucker, the father of modern business management, pair together quite
well: If a business cannot keep its customers, then eventually there is no business; and if knowledge
controls access to opportunities, then keeping customers requires effectively utilizing the company’s
collective knowledge about its customers.
Organizations actively pursuing increased revenues and competitiveness have taken Drucker’s decades-
old simple yet compelling truisms to heart, recognizing the vital need to better understand and serve
their customers to successfully retain and expand business with them. It is therefore an urgent priority
to provide a true 360 degree view of the customer comprising all available customer knowledge. Doing
so is critical to achieving key business benefits:
Customer service excellence that fosters loyalty and reduces churn. Even a 5% reduction to
churn can increase profitability by at least 25%1
Effectively targeted sales and marketing campaigns leading to increased revenue per customer
Proactive account management that cultivates customer relationships and expanded potential
business (“share of wallet”). Forrester reported customer experience leaders realize 14% higher
revenues2
A sense of urgency is strongly justified by data. A recent Aberdeen Group survey revealed that “best-in-
class” organizations (the top 20% in business performance) were twice as likely as laggards (in the
bottom 30%) to have at least some technology-based customer views in place. Additionally, those best
performing companies also reported an average 91% customer retention rate, while laggards reported
an alarmingly low average retention rate of just 10%.3 The opportunity for new revenues and
competitive advantage from successfully implementing a 360 degree view of the customer is enormous.
Furthermore, the current market environment, which features low interest rates and low investment
returns, makes it increasingly important for financial services firms to differentiate themselves from a
client service perspective.
Meanwhile, new unstructured information sources continue to proliferate: social media, web content,
“Big Data” sources (such as customer clickstream data), email, document stores, call center notes, open
ended survey questions and many others, to go with structured data sources including CRM and ERP
databases.
This white paper will explore an organizational maturity model that presents a path from customer
competency – the degree to which a company serves and sells to its customers with expected efficiency
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and coordination of customer data – to customer centricity – listening to, proactively understanding and
acting upon customer needs, likes and dislikes, as a vital part of a complete view of the customer.
A true 360 degree view of the customer requires combining all information sources – internal and
external, structured and unstructured – to access and analyze not only customer transactions and
account history, but also customer interests and feelings expressed about the company and its products.
The growing trend in the financial services industry toward best-of-breed system environments,
complex architectures, and multiple methods of client communication, makes it increasingly difficult to
achieve a 360 degree view of the customer without the proper technology.
You will also discover how unified information access technology, led by Attivio’s Active Intelligence
Engine®, achieves this vital integration and freely integrates, correlates and presents all related data and
content, complete with essential text analytics, to make a true 360 degree view an exciting new reality
at a fraction of the cost and complexity of alternative solutions.
An Organizational Maturity Model: From Customer Competency to
Customer Centricity
A review of research suggests three levels of maturity in assessing an organization’s capabilities in
serving, retaining and increasing business with its customers: Reactive, Responsive, and Proactive.
Levels of Customer Competency Customer Centricity
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Level 1
Reactive organizations struggle with inadequate means and ability to achieve effective customer
relations. Actions taken with customers are most often in response to an event in the past, with
predictably poor customer retention rates as a result.
Reactive companies are most likely to mismanage its customer interactions. Customers expect
transactions and inquiries, whether online or over the phone, to be quick, seamless and engaging. They
do not want to wait on hold, hear about the organization’s internal issues or frustrations, and will not
accept complex, time-wasting business processes. In many industries, switching vendors is quite simple.
Providing a satisfying customer experience is critical, particularly in light of social media, where it’s easy
to share customer dissatisfaction. The adverse impact of such negative online comments on future
business must not be underestimated; for example, some 90% of buyers trust peer reviews and 70%
trust online reviews, according to the American Marketing Association.4
Reactive organizations also struggle with low success rates in efforts to up-sell or cross-sell existing
customers. Of the “laggard” organizations in the previously mentioned 2011 survey, only 1 in 10
reported a year-over-year increase in sales quota attainment.5
Finally, targeted sales and marketing initiatives can result in frustrating mixed messages if these efforts
are not coordinated. A technology analyst shared an experience in which a company failed to respond to
his long-standing service requests, only to then send him a holiday card with thanks for being a loyal
customer. Such discordant communications lead customers to feel their concerns are not being taken
seriously.6 According to the American Society for Quality, 68% of customer defections occur due to a
perceived “attitude of indifference.”7
What are the root causes of such disjointed, relationship-damaging problems? Generally, companies in
reactive mode have an unacceptably high level of manual, ill-defined customer-facing business
processes, including time-wasting efforts to manually gather and work with customer information
buried within multiple silos of databases (CRM, ERP, etc.) and text-based information (email,
documents, etc.), impairing customer service.
Because underperforming businesses are only half as likely as top performers to provide common views
of customer information, customer service reps, sales staff and account managers often work with their
own isolated views of information in a non-coordinated manner. Such siloed efforts inevitably result in
embarrassing gaffes from inconsistent or contradictory messages that annoy and frustrate customers.
An urgent initial step for organizations to get out of reactive customer mode is to get internal
stakeholders on the same technological page with common views of customer-oriented data across
departments.8 Doing so will begin to improve the organization’s customer service gap and foster
communicating “with one voice.”
Level 2
Responsive organizations have taken that essential step and other actions to eradicate vexing issues
that exemplify a reactive customer mode, including a concerted effort to improve customer-facing
business processes.
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Responsive organizations are also three times more likely to have integrated key enterprise data
sources, notably CRM and ERP systems.9 Common data views of customer transactions, customer
service interactions, and account history are shared across service, sales, finance and other departments
to improve responses to customer inquiries and better-coordinated outbound customer
communications. Responsive organizations have attained an essential level of customer competency.
That said, such responsive businesses are still utilizing only a portion of their collective customer
knowledge from select structured data (databases). In fact, some vendors and technology pundits still
mistakenly refer to such a structured data-centric view as a 360 degree view of the customer. In reality,
such a view of the customer remains quite incomplete:
For today’s customer…it is not enough to know what products or services they have purchased in the past…Some of the world’s leading companies are already realizing significant returns by adopting a more customer-centric and holistic approach to their business...and finally move beyond the limitations of data- centric software solutions.10
Customer centricity has been around as a concept for a while. According to Wikipedia, “Customer
centricity refers to the orientation of a company to the needs and behaviors of its customers. Through
this approach the customer becomes the central platform from which the organization operates and any
decisions taken are viewed from the customer’s point of view.”11
Unfortunately, a data-centric view of the customer is inadequate to enable the ideal of customer
centricity, capable instead of yielding only modest incremental improvements to customer retention
and up-selling and cross-selling efforts.
Level 3
Proactive organizations have achieved a true 360 degree view of their customers to realize dramatically
improved customer service and loyalty, reduced churn, increased revenues per customer and expanded
customer “share of wallet.”
Although it may be possible to build a transactional view of all of a customer's interactions, orders, complaints, etc. with your company, those transactions only represent a tiny fraction of a true “360 [degree] customer view.” A consolidated list of transactions… tells us nothing about how a customer is thinking or feeling at any given point in time.12
Understanding how a customer – or a group of customers – is thinking or feeling requires not only
customer transactional data, but also information insights into levels of customer satisfaction, interests,
likes and dislikes, which can only be gained by listening to customers: what they have said in the past
and what they are saying now – whether they are talking to you or talking about you through social
media and other online resources.
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Side-Stepping the Technical Challenges of Customer Centricity
Gaining this critical customer insight requires the ability to analyze levels of customer sentiment
expressed in text communications; both internal (email, IM chat, surveys, phone call transcripts) and
external (social media, blogs, other online resources).
Beyond these customer communications and structured data sources already mentioned, there are still
many more information sources essential for a 360 degree view of the customer; structured and
unstructured, internal and external:
“Big Data” sources of customer activity such as clickstream data
Customer documents stored in SharePoint and document management systems
Customer data warehouses
Customer online community content and other online resources, and still more
Despite widespread awareness of the compelling benefits provided by a 360 degree view of the
customer, few organizations have successfully achieved it. Even among surveyed top-performing
businesses, only 1 in 4 said they have fully integrated all sources of customer information sources. But it
is well worth the effort: two thirds of surveyed companies said they were “definitely leaving money on
the table.” Only 2% of businesses surveyed claimed to have maxed out their customer wallet share.13
The primary barrier to achieving customer centricity is therefore a technical one:
With so many data [and content] repositories representing valid customer data, how can companies effectively establish a “single [source] of the truth” regarding their customer?14
The answer to this key question is unified information access technology, led by Attivio’s Active
Intelligence Engine (AIE), actively used today with great success by Fortune 10 global leaders and
disruptive startups alike.
Unlike other solutions, Attivio AIE was built from the ground up to combine and link all data and content
without restriction, as a true unified information access platform:
Schema-less, universal indexing; no data modeling. AIE ingests all data and content into its
universal index. AIE does not require relationships between any data or content to be defined in
advance. AIE eliminates the need to build to constantly update a data model to join and present
information.
By eliminating the need to build or constantly update a data model to join and present information,
AIE serves as an agile information management and development platform with exceptionally fast
time-to-value – more important than ever in today’s challenging economic climate, which has left
little appetite for lengthy implementation projects.
Additionally, AIE ingests structured data on a table-by-table basis, unlike legacy approaches like
enterprise search engines that must “flatten” or denormalize databases in order to ingest them,
severely diminishing their value.
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Advanced text analytics. Prior to indexing, AIE enriches and adds structure to documents and other
unstructured content to maximize findability and joinability with related data and content from
other sources. This includes a wide variety of built-in multi-language natural language processing
(NLP); text extraction; entity extraction and normalization; key phrase extraction; all-important
customer sentiment analysis (at the document and entity level) and behavioral analytics.
Patented ad hoc query-time JOIN of all related data and content. AIE performs ad hoc relational
JOINs of all related data and content matching a given query, again with no advance data modeling
required. The ability to perform ad hoc JOINs combined with the agility offered by the universal
index is groundbreaking functionality that was conceived and developed by Attivio.
Automatic workflows, including alerts and triggers perform a wide variety of data and content
processing for unified information access, with no user intervention required.
Support for business intelligence tools to access all customer data and content indexed within AIE
via ODBC/JDBC connectivity and full SQL support, for in-depth business intelligence by customer,
demographics, location, business unit, and more.
Just one example of a 360 degree view for a financial services customer, powered by AIE. Behind the scenes, AIE integrates and correlates customer data from transaction and CRM databases along with customer emails, chat logs, etc. AIE also utilizes advanced text analytics, including categorizing previous customer inquiries, detecting customer sentiment towards different products, and more.
This 360 degree view empowers customer service reps to serve each customer quickly and very effectively; enables sales managers to initiate up-sell/cross-sell efforts with offers targeted to the customer; and helps ensure personalized account management by proactively directing the account review with the customer towards products and services for which they have previously expressed interest and positive sentiment.
The results: enhanced new revenue and wallet share from highly-satisfied, loyal customers.
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Case Study: A 360 Degree View of Private Banking Customers
The private banking division of a leading global financial services organization wanted to improve
customer service and engagement, increase up-sell/cross-sell revenue and expand its customer base.
Each client is assigned a dedicated private banker to manage and grow the client’s net worth, leveraging
the bank’s substantial investment, lending and advisory resources.
After concluding its open search environment was inadequate for private bankers to provide timely,
superior customer service, the company launched a new initiative to build a comprehensive 360 degree
view of their high net worth clients using Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine (AIE). The customer
concluded that Attivio AIE was the only solution that could freely integrate and correlate all enterprise
information, with no need for advanced data modeling. Attivio AIE’s flexibility and agility enabled the
first phase of the implementation to be rolled out in just three months.
The private bank was looking to bring together twelve different information sources into a 360 degree
customer view. While the bank’s open source search tool had to perform twelve searches – a separate
search for each information silo, Attivio AIE performs one search query across all data sources, JOINing
all related data and content at query time resulting in improved performance and the ability to easily
add data sources.
Attivio AIE powers a 360 degree dashboard view of each high net worth client that presents private
bankers with account transactions and trends, demographic data, investment product details, research
content, news related to the client’s investments – and even about the clients themselves – plus other
sources of structured and unstructured information, empowering the private banker with a complete,
immediately actionable picture of the client.
A complex security model is applied to all of these sources of information, which Attivio AIE enforces in
real-time. This includes permissioning based on family relationships within a client account as well as
unique security requirements set by certain nations that mandate controls or restrictions to data access
based on geographic location and/or means of access (such as a mobile device versus a computer).
Thousands of private bankers around the world can get a comprehensive view of their clients using an
iPad application. Bankers can now easily search for information in the application. The search capability
is augmented with the ability to specify what information (what client relationships, products, external
news, etc.) to return in the results. AIE also enriches and adds structure to documents and other
unstructured content to maximize findability with related data and content from other sources.
Private bankers have been able to reduce the time spent on inquiries and facilitate improved client
consultations, both of which have resulted in improved customer satisfaction. With improved access to
information bankers are now able to take a proactive approach to managing customer relationships.
The private bank realizes that family relations will inherit the assets of the private bank’s long-standing
older clients. Recognizing that these younger clients will prefer to interact directly with their information
online rather than by phone, the private bank will provide clients direct access to its 360 degree views in
the near future – which Attivio AIE will easily support with its unified information access agility.
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Conclusion: Make a True 360 Degree View of the Customer a Reality
Peter Drucker’s quote, “The purpose of business is to get and keep a customer,” is a succinct expression
about serving customers that implies customer centricity.15 While integrating of CRM, ERP and other
structured customer data will enable an essential level of customer competency, achieving customer
centricity requires a true 360 degree view of the customer.
A harder position to take [than a data-centric customer view]… that can yield better results in the form of long term profitable, win-win relationships is one that seeks first to understand the things customers value, the journeys they go through and the critical moments of truth within those journeys.16
A true 360 degree of the customer will present not only a customer’s past transactions and account
history, but also the customer’s interests, concerns, likes and dislikes. Such customer intelligence can
only be derived by a solution capable of listening to customer communications, both direct with the
company and indirectly via social media and other online resources. This vital information must also be
integrated and correlated with customer databases, Big Data sources, email, customer documents and
scores of other siloed customer information.
By implementing a 360 degree view of the customer, organizations gain full control and command of all
the relevant information needed to deliver seamless customer service for maximum loyalty and
retention; enable effective, targeted marketing and sales campaigns for substantially increased revenue
from existing customers, and cultivate long-term business relationships that expand “wallet share.”
Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine, as the leading unified information access platform, is a key enabling
technology that effectively overcomes the key technological obstacles to implementing a 360 degree
view of the customer: how to integrate so many disparate structured and unstructured sources of
customer information.
Attivio AIE freely integrates, correlates and presents all related customer information, regardless of data
type or original source, including identifying and analyzing levels of customer sentiment from customer
communications and their opinions expressed on social media and other online sources – all with no
data modeling required.
The path to providing a complete view of the customer lies not in eliminating data sources, but integrating them and providing access that is easy to navigate and always available. [Along with] primary repositories, integrating other technologies [including] social media and sales intelligence sources… [are essential] to round out the view. The net result: better service and higher sales.17
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About Attivio
Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine® (AIE), redefines the business impact of our customers’ information
assets, so they can quickly seize opportunities, solve critical challenges and fulfill their strategic vision.
Attivio correlates disparate silos of structured data and unstructured content in ways never before
possible. Offering both intuitive search capabilities and the power of SQL, AIE seamlessly integrates with
existing BI and big data tools to reveal insight that matters, through the access method that best suits
each user’s technical skills and priorities. Please visit us at www.attivio.com.
Attivio, Inc. • 275 Grove Street • Newton, MA 02466 USA
o +1.857.226.5040 • f +1.857.226.5072 • [email protected]• www.attivio.com
© 2013 Attivio, Inc. All rights reserved. Attivio, Active Intelligence Engine, and all other related logos and product names are registered trademarks of Attivio in the United States and/or other countries. All other company, product, and service names are the property of their respective holders and may be registered trademarks or trademarks in the United States and/or other countries.
Footnotes 1 Aderath Albee, Hello Mr. Customer; It's Me...Your Vendor, Marketing Interactions Blog (April 9, 2011). 2 Bruce D. Temkin, Customer Experience Boosts Revenue, Forrester Research (May 2010). 3 Peter Ostrow, Leveraging the 360 Degree Customer View to Maximize Up-Sell and Cross-Sell Potential, Aberdeen Group (2011). 4 Base One B2B Buyers’ Report (April 2010). 5 Ostrow. 6 Gabriel Gheorghiu, Your 360-degree View of the Customer: Keep the Customer in View, Technology Evaluation Centers Blog (May 17, 2012). 7 Albee. 8 Ostrow. 9 Ibid. 10 Grant Johnson, Customer Centricity Begins Where a 360-Degree View Ends, Marketing for Results Blog (May 20, 2011, emphasis added). 11 Wikipedia entry for Customer Centricity, quoted by Grant Johnson (emphasis added). 12 Laurence Buchanan, The 360 Degree Customer View is Dead, Customer Think Blog (October 17, 2012, emphasis added). 13 Ostrow. 14 Ibid. 15 Johnson. 16 Buchanan. 17 Ostrow.