Gartner says abandon the Customer 360, how about we just think about it in context?
Gartner recently released a blog saying we should abandon the efforts to create a customer 360, now as someone who implemented an active 360 project over a decade ago this interested me. Their point was pretty simple and summed up in this picture:
Their prediction is pretty stark:
“By 2026, 80% of organizations pursuing a “360-degree view of the customer” will abandon these efforts because they flout data privacy regulations, rely on obsolete data collection methods, and erode customer trust”
What interested me though was not so much that prediction, but the context. What they were talking about was the marketing customer 360, that is particularly getting the external interactional view of the customer. Something that regulations like GDPR and CCPA are certainly making more problematic. So I’m going to agree with Gartner that an operational marketing Customer 360 is not something you are going to create in it’s entirety. But I’d argue that isn’t the most important Customer 360, so lets get to the heart of what a 360 really is, and why from a regulatory perspective you need that beating heart, even if you don’t use it to get all of the associated data.
GDPR, and CCPA, are based around the idea of the “natural person” so what is a natural person?
The meaning of natural person is a human being as distinguished from a person (as a corporation) created by operation of law.
Or to put it another way, a “natural person” is you and I, physical, corporeal beings. As distinguished from corporations, or records in databases. So in order to comply with these regulations I need to be able to identify the individual, so when they tick “do not market” it applies to them as an individual, not just a single record in a database.
My point here is that while collecting all of the data about an individual within marketing will indeed be an endless and potentially futile task, that doesn’t mean the most important part of the Customer 360 shouldn’t exist.
The heart of Customer 360 is to uniquely identify the natural person in every interaction you have
What Gartner are talking about is the marketing part of the 360, a most importantly (to use their phrase):
near-impossible technical challenges, accelerating regulatory scrutiny, and data collection practices that ignore what customers want — Gartner (emphasis mine)
Customers, or citizens, do not want you creating an all seeing, all knowing database of everything, neither do forward looking regulators. However what they all want is that you treat the person as an individual. Thus I’d argue there are three challenges in the Customer 360
- Identification of the individual
- The context of the interaction
- The assembly of data relevant to that interaction
In the Gartner post the context in marketing, and the data is certainly including pieces covered by GDPR. It also often includes, as Gartner highlights, data which has significantly diminishing returns in terms of its impact on outcomes against the effort to collect.
Does this mean therefore that you shouldn’t have a Customer 360 that includes all of the customers accounts, all of their orders, and all of the campaigns that you’ve targeted at them? Of course not. What it means is that in the specific context of marketing there is a lot of data that is not worth collecting, but (and this is important) if you can uniquely identify the individual you could get that data, if it is worth the effort.
So organizationally we should absolutely have that x-ref, because its required by the very regulations that make the marketing 360 not worth the effort.
The point here therefore is that Gartner’s point is about the cost and value of data collection, in terms of collection, reputation, analytics and outcomes. When I’ve got the x-ref done right then any 360 could be created, if it is worth it, but it shouldn’t mean that I should view the acquisition of data as being a goal in itself. To look at it another way, I could argue that a customer 360 that covers orders, shipments, payments etc is totally required. I could argue that as quite clearly not having that would be insane.
This doesn’t mean however that for every shipment I need the per second GPS coordinate of the package, or for every order I need a map of parts being assembled into the final product, put into a warehouse, picked off the shelf, etc. If I’m doing a food delivery service then the GPS data is required, and through a mobile app I make it easy to obtain, but if I’m shipping apples to a retailer, they care about when they arrive, not that the truck is currently at some traffic lights.
What this means is that identification is the heart of the 360, what you choose to collect around that is down to the value it delivers for the effort it requires. What ‘360’ means is context specific, value specific, and cost specific.
