Creating a 360 View of Complex Corporate Clients

Creating a holistic, 360 degree client view is no simple feat when your corporate clients include large multinationals with complex structures. Your company might work with various people within the same company across different divisions, departments, or product lines. You probably have multiple internal views of client hierarchies that don’t align and are also different from the view that external data sources have.

How do you stitch together all that data across internal and external systems to build a holistic, client 360 view of these relationships? 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 build better insights into your client data relationships by using customer intelligence. By gaining this level of clarity of your data, you understand where departments in your organization need to connect to improve client services and where they should invest more time and effort for greater returns.

Companies manage accounts in isolation without the ability to see how the information connects to reveal the overall 360 degree client relationship.

The Challenge of Managing Hierarchies in Isolation

Large corporate or multinational clients are made up of many different legal entities that are connected based on some form of ownership. Your company might have a relationship with various parts of a corporate group and at different hierarchical levels.

Companies often manage these relationships in isolation without the ability to see how the information connects to reveal the overall client relationship. This isolation becomes more evident as you attempt to map the hierarchy of a client. For example, your sales team might have their own view of a client hierarchy based on the people they engage with and sell to within that organization. Meanwhile, your legal or finance team might have a different view of that hierarchy based on the legal ownership structure.

When it comes to connecting those two views together, you want to know who you’re selling to but also who you’re getting your revenue from and who you’re contracting with. These views are often misaligned because of the different perspectives of the hierarchies across your different departments. Trying to get a client 360 view of a relationship and information from different departments is difficult because it involves an overwhelming amount of manual work.

Also, the structures of these corporate hierarchies can change over time, such as when M&As occur or entities close. Managing and updating that information is challenging because you then have multiple copies of information across different departments, magnifying the difficulty in trying to create a client 360 view.

Traditional approaches provide a rigid view of corporate hierarchies that don’t easily cater for different users and business applications.

Why Traditional or Rigid Approaches Don’t Work

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 their 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, company closure, or other type of update. By having this information, they can update and map to some of their internal records. However, many companies struggle to make that work.

One problem is because they use traditional matching. When faced with poor data quality and misalignment between internal views and external views of hierarchies, these approaches result in excessive undermatching 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.

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

A contextual decision intelligence platform built on AI and machine learning gives you a flexible 360 degree client view.

How to Create a Client 360 View of Your Data

Creating a true client 360 view of your data starts with a contextual decision intelligence platform built on AI and machine learning. It combines entity resolution, network generation, and analytics.

1. Create a single view of client entities

   The client 360 view begins 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. 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.

Insights and Opportunities From a 360 degree View of Client Data

A 360 degree view of your client data 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: 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.

A Consistent Data Backbone with Customizable Hierarchical 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. No longer does each department or product group have its own unique view that it manages separately. Instead, by having all that information together, you’re able to have a complete view of even your most complex clients. With this information, you gain clear vision and understanding into how to better serve your clients.