Polle de Maagt 
Polle de Maagt
The 360° fantasy.
A lot of attention in marketing and customer experience goes to the 360° customer view. All the data, from every channel, in one place. It sounds like care. In practice it often becomes the opposite.
The more companies know about you, the more they send you. Bought trousers once? Trousers for the rest of your life. Looked at a television once? You get chased around the internet for weeks. In a talk in 2017 I called that what it is: that is not service, that is stalking. It should be the other way around. The more you know, the less you bother people.
And all that data does not even guarantee the basics. I once had to fill in my details at a hotel desk after more than 350 nights booked through the same platform.
A warm bath.
A warm bath is about 38 degrees. Not hotter, not colder. Enough to relax, not enough to feel watched. That is the view a customer actually wants you to have: just enough to make it feel personal.
360° is a fantasy, 38° is a feeling
You don't need all the data. You need enough of it, and you need to do something with it.
A 38° view means using only the data you can clearly justify as helpful to the customer. Comfort over completeness. Trust over optimisation. A 360° view is an internal ambition: total visibility. A 38° view is an external experience: this company gets me, and nothing feels creepy.
Seat 6F.
On a KLM flight I had been upgraded from seat 6F to 1F in business class. The flight attendant had left a card for me on 6F. She could not find it anymore, so she wrote a new one and apologised at length.
It was never about the card. It was that it mattered to her. She knew my name and my seat, that was all the data there was. What she did with it made the flight: real, personal, and she took the trouble.
The warm bath test.
Before you add another data source, a dashboard or a personalisation rule, ask three questions:
- If we told the customer we use this, would it still feel okay?
- Does it make the experience warmer, simpler or more predictable for them, not just for us?
- What is the smallest set of signals that gets us there?
In practice: customer service that sees enough context to spare you repeating your story, without showing everything. A shop that remembers the preferences that save you effort, without over-personalising. An onboarding that asks for information at the moment it becomes useful, not all at once.
Take one piece of customer data you collect. Would you still use it if you had to tell the customer? If not, stop collecting it. If yes, what is the one thing you could do with it tomorrow?
From my talks for SAP Hybris (March 2017) and the SAP CX event (April 2024), where the slides said: 360° customer view, crossed out, and 38°, a warm bath.
