A Gartner survey found that only 14 percent of organizations have achieved a 360-degree view of the customer, but 82 percent of respondents said they still aspire to obtain one.

So what’s the issue? Building a Customer 360 is comparable to completing a puzzle with pieces from a hundred different boxes. Your business has many scattered pieces (data) stuck inside your CRM system, web analytics platform, product analytics platform, sales platforms, email/marketing automation platforms, advertising platforms and many more that need to fit together. Even when you feel that you’re close to finishing the puzzle, you usually find another piece that you don’t know how to make fit.

The good news for data teams is that advancements in technology over the last few years make this project much more achievable. This especially serves to benefit data teams looking to demonstrate value and provide improved insights to their cross-functional teams.

What is a Customer 360?

A Customer 360 is a comprehensive and centralized view that captures all of the data and interactions that a business has with that customer across all channels and touchpoints. It provides a 360-degree understanding of customer behavior patterns and to help anticipate their needs. 

This enables organizations to deliver more personalized experiences, improve customer engagement and create targeted marketing and offerings. These data-driven endeavors ultimately help increase loyalty and retention, and in turn, revenue. 

Centralizing data to build your Customer 360

Centralized data is the most critical requirement for a Customer 360. Without a single source of truth for all of your disparate data sources, it’s impossible to build a holistic view of your customers that decision-makers and stakeholders can access seamlessly. 

Organizations that have reached a higher level of data maturity have a dedicated data team that ensures that crucial data is validated, automated and most importantly, centralized. This creates a single source of truth for clean, accurate and up-to-date data – allowing the organization to make better decisions. 

Without support, marketers often encounter the challenges involved in building this single source of truth on their own. Marketers at immature organizations will piece together data from siloed sources in different formats, hoping to get a clear picture of their customers and campaigns. This daunting task is ineffective and it often leads to an incomplete customer view. 

The centralization of validated data into a single source of truth that drives data democratization allows marketers to spend their time on more impactful activities, such as leveraging a Customer 360 to segment customers, personalize outreach/offerings and expand relationships.

With Fivetran, we simplify the centralization process with a simple setup and fully-managed maintenance using our pre-built connectors. Let’s walk through the common data sources, Fivetran connector setup, popular tables and available transformations. These are the first steps to accelerating your advertising insights and becoming your marketing team’s data superhero. 

What connectors matter for Customer 360?

There are a handful of primary data source types to centralize for this project.

Conversion data 

• Your organization likely uses one application or database for your conversions. The type of platform used depends on your organization’s business model.
• The data from these platforms will provide insights into actual conversions and outcomes resulting from your campaigns.

Commonly used conversion sources based on company sales type: 

• B2B (contracts, sign-ups, etc.) - likely using a CRM system (customer relationship management)

• Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics 365, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Zendesk Sales, Gainsight

• B2C (purchases/subscriptions) - likely using a POS system (Point of sale) 

• Shopify, Stripe, Squire, Zuora, Magento

• Complicated - likely using an ERP system (Enterprise resource planning)

• NetSuite, Oracle Fusion, SAP, Anaplan, Microsoft Dynamics 

Product data

• Your organization likely uses one product platform.
• Product data provides insights to track user’s behavior when they are using your platform, what actions they are taking and better understand onboarding flow

Commonly used events platforms:

• Pendo, Mixpanel

Events data

• Your organization likely uses one email campaign platform.
• Event platforms provide critical data on how customers interact with your website/app. Know what customers are reading, clicking and engaging with to act on potential bottlenecks. 

Commonly used events platforms:

• Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, Segment 

Customer success and support data

• Your organization likely uses one application for your customer success/support data. The type of platform used depends on your organization’s business model.
• The data from these platforms helps you track customer support tickets, satisfaction and behavior. 

Commonly used conversion sources based on company sales type: 

• B2B - likely using a customer service solution 

• Zendesk, Intercom 

• B2C - combination of customer service solution or responding directly through social media pages

• Zendesk, Intercom, Instagram, Twitter 

Email Data

• Your organization likely uses one email campaign platform.
• The data from your email platform holds important engagement metrics such as open rate, click through rate, conversion rate and more. 

Commonly used email platforms:

• Marketo, HubSpot, Mailchimp

To find out which platforms your company uses, consult with your marketing team and ensure we have a Fivetran connector by exploring availability here.

Advertising data

• Your organization likely uses three to eight advertising platforms. 
• The advertising data sources may differ depending on if you are a B2B or B2C business, but the data from these platforms will provide valuable insights into the campaign performance and reach.

Commonly used advertising platforms:

B2B: 

• Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Microsoft Ads, Campaign Manager, The Trade Desk

B2C:

• Facebook Ads, TikTok Ads, Snapchat Ads, Reddit Ads, Twitter Ads

How to set up a Fivetran connector for Customer 360

Let’s walk through the steps to enable a connector. We will use Salesforce as an example. You will follow similar steps for the other necessary data sources your organization uses.

Prerequisites:

To connect Salesforce to Fivetran, you need:

• Access to an active Salesforce account
• A Salesforce Enterprise level account plan or higher, or purchased Salesforce API calls

Optional steps:

• To set up a Salesforce connector, you can use any Salesforce user within your organization that has permission to read data from Salesforce's APIs. However, we recommend creating a dedicated user and limit data access for this user only to data you want to sync.
• You can limit data access for a user by creating a profile in Salesforce and assigning it to the user.

Step 1: Add connector

• Search for Salesforce in the dashboard and click Continue Setup.

Step 2: Authorize API and test connection

• Ensure you have appropriate access to all the campaigns and accounts. Use an Admin account where possible. Input a Destination Schema, choose your Connection Method and Authorize API.
  

Step 3: Fetching schema 

Sit tight. Fivetran will fetch the schema to allow you to choose which Salesforce tables you’d like to sync to your destination. You will receive an email when the connector schema is ready. 

Step 4: Choose data to sync

• Fivetran syncs the data that we have access to based on the viewing permissions of the connected user. If you don't want Fivetran to sync a certain type of data into your destination, limit the permissions of the connecting user.
• You can pick and choose every object and field you wish to sync with the Salesforce connector. It's safe to have a Salesforce user with full read access to everything as long as the Fivetran user makes choices. Customers typically have 600+ objects in their Salesforce instance and generally sync around 60-80.

Note: There are two ways to limit the data that we extract from your Salesforce account:

1. Disable tables in the Fivetran dashboard under the “Schema” tab 
2. Limit the connecting user in Salesforce.

Step 5: Start initial sync

• The first historical sync that Fivetran does for a connector is called the initial sync. We extract and process all the historical data from the selected tables in the source. You’ll receive an email when this step is complete. 

How to transform data to enable Customer 360

After you’ve ingested data into your cloud based destination, leverage our Quickstart Data models to ready that raw data for use. These models serve as an efficient and automated way to turn application data into analytics-ready tables without building your own dbt project and have no impact on your consumption. 

In this step, you’ll transform your raw Salesforce opportunities, accounts and leads data into the tables you need to analyze ARR, NRR and New Business Bookings. You can also create views of your business-critical Salesforce Formula Fields in your destination, ensuring you have the custom, business-driving KPIs you need for analytics. 

Here’s how to do this in a few clicks:

Step 6: Quickstart Data Models

1. Navigate to the “Transformation” tab and either click “Get started” > “Quickstart transformation” if you’re starting from scratch or “Add transformation” > “Quickstart transformation” if you have existing dbt transformations (which you can continue to use in parallel).
2. Configure your Quickstart transformation: You only need to make three choices. 

• The data source: Salesforce
• The connector with the data you want to transform: Salesforce 
• The orchestration schedule, which we recommend “fully integrated” so you automate model runs with connector loads, decreasing data latency and computational costs

1. Now you have the analytics-ready data in your destination including views of your Formula Fields. Turn that data into visualizations, reports, business intelligence or ad-hoc analysis.

Bonus: You can also integrate your dbt project to orchestrate and manage custom data models or use free Fivetran data models that are not yet available via Quickstart transformations such as our popular Ad Reporting package, which makes analyzing your return on ad spend easy. 

How to use your newly-integrated data to build a Customer 360

Step 8: Uncover insights

After connecting your CRM, connect your other relevant data sources (email, events, ads, ERP customer support, etc) into your warehouse to create a Customer 360. 

With Fivetran, data is ingested in standardized schemas so it’s query ready for your team to work with. While there’s no one specific way to build a Customer 360, we suggest the following steps:

• Establish data mappings: Join datasets from your different sources and create relationships between different data elements.
• Develop a customer identification mechanism: Assign a unique identifier to each customer across different data sources so you can link and aggregate their data from various touchpoints.
• Model: Define the structure of the data, including entities (e.g., customers, interactions), attributes (e.g., customer demographics, purchase history) and relationships (e.g., customer-product, customer-support tickets).
• Analyze: Segment and profile your customers, and use predictive modeling to understand their behaviors, preferences and patterns. This helps personalize your outreach.
• Communicate: Share your findings and insights with your stakeholders and maximize the impact of your marketing campaigns, improve customer loyalty, reduce churn and gain a competitive advantage. 

How the Denver Broncos built a Customer 360 

As the Denver Broncos continue to build on their 50+ year-long home game sellout streak, their lean data team needed to stop focusing so much on maintaining data pipelines and focusing on communicating and reaching the next generation of fans. 

Fivetran empowered the team to:

• Create a unified and personalized cross-platform customer experience.
• See the entire marketing mix. With access to over 60+ marketing connectors, the Broncos can leverage prebuilt data reports that provide insights on ad campaign performance, website/app engagement, demographics and more. 
• Combine the insights from these platforms across inter-department tools across finance, sales and HR to build a holistic view. 

These insights have helped to create a winning experience for fans by making every aspect of game day — from pulling into the parking lot to going to the gate to purchasing food or merchandise — as frictionless as possible. 

Learn more about how the Denver Broncos centralized their data, saved hours of effort and built Fan 360.

Ready to try it for yourself? Try for free today. 

Already a Fivetran customer? Add a connector to get started.