Customer 360: how to bring all your customer information into one view

Take a hypothetical distribution company with 120 employees. A salesperson calls a regular customer with a new offer. He does not know that the customer has been waiting two weeks for a complaint to be resolved, because the complaint is in the customer service system and he only looks at the CRM.

A week later, the sales manager offers the same customer a higher credit limit – the amount up to which the customer can buy on deferred payment terms. She does not know that three invoices are overdue, because only the accounts department can see them. The management board, in turn, judges the customer by turnover, even though delivery costs and the cost of handling complaints are recorded in another system.

None of these people made a mistake. Each of them looked at their own system, which showed only its own piece of the truth. If you recognise these situations, your company has several of the following symptoms:

Customer 360 – the customer seen from every angle – is a single card showing everything the company knows about a customer. The data does not have to move into a new system. Invoices stay in the accounting system, sales opportunities in the CRM and tickets in the customer service system; the card simply retrieves and combines them.

This is an important distinction, because it changes the scope of the project. You are not replacing your CRM or accounting system, and you are not teaching people a new way of working. You are adding a read-only layer, and each piece of information still has one system where it is entered and corrected.

Before you start, it is worth writing down which system is the source of which information. The table below shows an example of such a split.

The most common mistake is trying to show everything. A card with forty fields is just as unreadable as five separate systems. It is better to start with the questions people ask before talking to a customer or making a decision.

Collect two or three such questions from each department and pick the ones that come up most often. In a typical trading company, the starting list looks roughly like this:

Technically, combining data from several systems is not difficult today. What is difficult is establishing that “ABC Sp. z o.o.” in the CRM and “ABC SPÓŁKA Z OGRANICZONĄ ODPOWIEDZIALNOŚCIĄ” in the accounting system (the short and full forms of the same Polish company name) are the same company. Without that, the customer card will show half the invoices or double the turnover.

In Poland, the best key is the tax identification number (NIP), because every company has one and it appears on every invoice. So first check whether the NIP is entered for every customer in the CRM and the accounting system. Along the way, you will uncover duplicates, inactive accounts and customers entered without a number.

Also set rules for borderline cases. A customer with several branches has one NIP but different delivery addresses. A group of companies has several NIPs that the management board wants to see together. These rules need to be written down before the report is built, not during.

Companies working on Microsoft 365 usually have three options. They differ in cost, effort and what you can do with them later. We compare them in the table below.

The simplest option is Power BI alone – Microsoft’s tool for reports and charts. Power BI can pull data directly from the accounting system, an SQL database, the CRM or Excel files and match it by NIP. It connects to systems running on a server on your premises through a data gateway – a small program that securely passes data to the cloud.

The second option is a shared Dataverse database that stores a unified customer card, plus Power Automate to synchronise data. It makes sense when the card should not only display data but also let people do something, such as add a note from a call. The third option, a data warehouse in Microsoft Fabric, pays off only with a large number of systems and a need for analysis over many years. In the table we have also added a fourth possibility, outside the Microsoft 365 tools: a customer card in the CRM itself.

Licences are usually the smaller part of the budget. According to Microsoft’s October 2026 price list, with annual billing, Power BI Pro costs USD 14 and Power BI Premium Per User USD 24 per user per month. Power Apps Premium is USD 20 and Power Automate Premium USD 15. Power BI Pro is already included in Microsoft 365 E5 plans.

A common mistake in cost estimates is assuming that Dataverse and connections to external systems are “included in Microsoft 365”. The free rights cover only standard connectors, such as SharePoint or Outlook. Connections to many non-Microsoft systems, such as SQL databases or SAP, are premium connectors that require a paid licence.

For example, if 30 people view the customer card in Power BI, Pro licences cost 30 × USD 14, or USD 420 a month. The cost of the work, on the other hand, depends on several factors listed below. A detailed quote can only be prepared after reviewing the source systems.

Bringing data together in one place makes work easier, but it also increases risk. The customer card contains personal data of contact persons, and often also commercial information that not every employee should see. Permissions therefore need to be planned together with the scope of the card.

A sensible rule: salespeople see their own customers, managers see their team’s, and the management board sees everyone. Details of receivables can be visible only to sales and finance. Power BI lets you restrict the visible rows depending on who opens the report.

The GDPR requires data to be limited to what is necessary for the purpose (Article 5). So do not carry private phone numbers or personal notes over to the card. A bonus of the project: when a customer requests access to their data, it is easier to respond within the required one-month deadline.

It is best to start with one group of users and one need. Usually that means salespeople preparing for calls or the management board reviewing the largest customers. The first version should be small but used every day.

The steps below take you from questions to a working card without a big project at the start:

Not every company needs a separate customer card. If you have a few dozen customers and one team that knows them personally, a well-maintained CRM is enough. The same applies when the CRM is already connected to the accounting system and shows payments – then it is better to finish that integration than to build something alongside it.

When the project does make sense, the same mistakes keep recurring. We list the most common ones below.