The 360° Customer Insight – Ambition or Illusion?
Every marketer dreams of it: a single, complete customer profile where everything comes together. From the first click to the final purchase, from upsells to customer retention. A place where all interactions, preferences, and behavioral patterns are visible. Sounds amazing, right?
But the reality is often less glamorous. For most companies, the “perfect customer picture” remains an illusion. Data is scattered across countless systems, teams have their own definitions of success, and insights sometimes get lost in endless dashboards. The result? Everyone has a partial view of the customer, but no one has the full story.
That doesn’t mean we’re powerless. There are multiple ways to gain valuable customer insights, from small, direct actions to large-scale, data-driven strategies. You don’t have to wait for a perfect complete picture. The art lies in knowing which approach is most effective at each stage. Sometimes you start small, sometimes you dive straight in with experiments or extensive analyses.
Why the perfect customer picture is so rare
The problem? Everyone works with their own tools. Sales has dashboards, marketing uses another system, and customer success uses something else entirely. Combining everything? Almost impossible. It’s like trying to use Google Maps, Waze, and Apple Maps at the same time… you don’t get a clear view, just chaos.
How to use customer insights effectively
- Start small. Don’t try to create a perfect overall picture right away. Ask yourself one simple question first: what insight do I need now to take the next step?
- Tackle the biggest blind spot in the customer journey. Where are you losing the most value, and how can you fix it? Focus on what matters most, rather than perfection.
- Centralize your knowledge. Even a simple shared spreadsheet with customer insights is often more effective than a tangle of systems. Having everything in one place makes it easier to spot patterns and make smarter decisions.
- Encourage team collaboration. Customer insight only works if everyone is on the same page. Agree together: who are our best customers? What do they value most? And what do we deliver for them? Aligning on this creates a shared understanding and a foundation for better actions.
The real challenge in customer insight
It’s not missing data, it’s ourselves. We tend to look only for numbers that confirm what we already believe. Want to truly make data-driven decisions? You have to be willing to look at data that challenges your assumptions.
As Kevin says in the podcast:
“You don’t need a perfect customer picture. You need a useful customer picture.”
Want to learn how to move from illusion to action? Listen to the Data Demystified podcast, here.
