3 Steps to Creating a Client 360 View of Complex Corporate Clients

Building a Client 360 View, a complete and connected view of your corporate customers, is essential for uncovering opportunities, improving client experiences and managing complex relationships. For organizations working with large multinationals, this means unifying internal and external data, mapping corporate hierarchies, and keeping pace with changes such as mergers and acquisitions.

This is no simple feat when your organization might work with various people within the same company across different divisions, departments, or product lines. Additionally, there is data being consumed from external sources for enrichment that might have conflicting views, for example, different ownership structures.

So, how do you stitch together all that data across internal and external systems to build a holistic view of your clients and their relationships for real customer intelligence? And once you build that view, how do you keep up with changes within those hierarchies, such as mergers and acquisitions (M&A)?

In this post, see how to create a single view that allows you to build better insights into your client data relationships by using customer intelligence. By gaining this level of clarity of your data, you streamline client reporting, uncover new client insights, enhance client experience, deepen relationships and increase the productivity of customer-facing teams.

Challenges in creating a Client 360 View for complex corporate clients

Large corporate or multinational clients often consist of many legal entities, connected by complex ownership structures. While mapping these hierarchies can be challenging, the bigger issue is that different teams within your company may each have their own version of the client’s structure. Your sales team might focus on the parts of the organization they interact with and sell to, while your legal or finance team might organize the same client based on formal ownership records. Without a connected view, these perspectives remain fragmented, making it harder to understand the true scope of the relationship.

When it comes to connecting those two views together, you want to know whom you’re selling to, but also whom you’re getting your revenue from and with whom you’re contracting. These views are often misaligned because of the different perspectives of the hierarchies across your different departments. Relationship mapping and getting a complete view of a relationship is difficult because it involves an overwhelming amount of manual work, and getting information from different departments.

Also, the structures of these corporate hierarchies can change over time, such as when M&As occur or entities cease doing business. Managing and updating that information is challenging because you then have multiple copies of information across different departments. This makes trying to create a client 360 view even more difficult.

Why traditional client hierarchy mapping fails to deliver a true 360 view

In attempts to connect the views, some organizations keep with the status quo and rely heavily on manual efforts for reporting and piecing information together. Despite best efforts, they continue to face the same challenges with viewing information across organizational hierarchies.

However, some organizations are testing out a more advanced way to view hierarchical information, by trying to connect to external data. This way, they gain an external source of truth around the latest view of a company — to show, for example, an M&A, a company closure, or another type of update. By having this information, they can update and map to some of their internal records. Yet many companies struggle to make that work.

One problem is using traditional matching. When faced with poor data quality and misalignment between internal views and external views of hierarchies, these approaches result in excessive under-matching or over-matching.

Another problem is the rigidity of the approach. That is, a group within your company will require a certain view of the client hierarchy. Then, if another group needs a different view of that data, such as between your legal and sales departments, they’ll make a separate copy of it for that purpose only. Before long, you’ll end up with multiple copies of data, each managed separately, and each for a different purpose.

By using these approaches, you won’t maintain a common data backbone that stitches the data together to create a single view of your data.

How to build a Client 360 View using Entity Resolution and Data Integration

Creating a true client 360 view of your data starts with building a strong data foundation using a Decision Intelligence Platform integrating on AI and machine learning.

1. Create a single view of client entities. The client 360 view begins with client data integration by using Entity Resolution to create a single view of your client entities and link to external sources. This approach pulls data together across disparate data sources, processing poor quality, sparse, and out-of-date data more effectively than traditional matching. Once you unify the data and remove the data quality issues, you get a true single view of your internal data enriched with external information.

2. Generate flexible hierarchies. You apply network generation to connect the entities based on hierarchical information, or corporate hierarchy mapping. These networks are built dynamically, meaning you can have different versions of the hierarchies for different users, all built from a common foundation – for example, one version may be a legal hierarchy view, while another might include links through individuals seen as key controllers and connect franchisors to franchisees. This allows you to uncover connections and behaviors that are impossible to see when looking at data in isolation. You capture the broader context of the client hierarchy— including links to other individuals, businesses, and market events — to inform better decision-making.

3. Use Graph Analytics to derive unique insights. By using Graph Analytics capabilities, you score your client networks for opportunity and risk based on changes in internal and external data. Any changes to the external data automatically propagate through your hierarchies in real-time, keeping the information current. Scoring models allow you to identify the changes of interest and trigger proactive client or prospect engagement.

Business insights and opportunities from a Client 360 View

A 360-degree view of your client data gives you better customer intelligence and opens your business up to greater insights and opportunities to better serve your customers. Here are the key advantages of this solution:

• Consistent view of clients across different divisions and departments. Gain a better understanding of the totality of your client relationships. This view makes it easier to create reports and enables upper management to quickly get a top-down view.

• Easier identification of opportunities across a client:

  • Revenue opportunities: Tune into the part or parts of a client organization or structure that you’re not currently doing business with at all.

  • Risk-management opportunities: Improve risk detection and become more aware of risks that you didn't know about before that you want to flag, manage, and track.

You can accurately process and analyze the holistic views of clients to understand their overall behavior, gain a better sense of the products or services they’re using, and identify new opportunities where you can serve them better.

• Access to external data changes for proactive relationship management: Keep on the pulse of M&As or news events so you can proactively engage with your clients rather than reacting to such events when it’s too late.

• See the relationships between the people in your organization and the people and levels they associate within your client organizations: With access to Client 360 hierarchical views, you can gain insights and understanding about where opportunities lie for the best engagements or referrals in your existing teams and how you can leverage them to nurture and expand the relationship.

Creating a consistent data backbone for flexible corporate hierarchy views

By using a contextual Decision Intelligence Platform that combines dynamic entities, network generation, and analytics, you gain a single copy of your data — a consistent underlying data backbone.

The biggest advantage of this approach is your organization shifts from being product-centric to becoming more client-centric with improved client lifecycle management. No longer does each department or product group have its own unique view that it manages separately. Instead, with this data unification, you're able to have a complete view of even your most complex clients. Armed with this unified insight, you can anticipate needs, uncover new opportunities, and strengthen relationships at every stage of the client journey.

A Client 360 View gives you the clarity and intelligence to serve your clients better, anticipate their needs, and grow relationships strategically. If you’re ready to unify your data and create a true Client 360 View, talk to our team today.