BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Data-Driven Customer Experience: The Challenge Of Openness

This article is more than 7 years old.

Data-driven customer experience is critical to the future growth and development of organizations, particularly in today’s hyper-competitive economy. A recent Forbes Insights report, “Data Elevates the Customer Experience: New Ways of Discovering and Applying Customer insights,”—sponsored by SAS and based on a survey of 357 executives of large organizations—finds that the benefits of evolving to data-driven customer experiences (data-driven CX) are wide-ranging, including enhancing revenue generation and enabling cost reduction, as well as accelerating process efficiencies and quality improvements.

The survey measures organizations’ data-driven CX progress based on three key pillars—organization (people), openness (data) and orchestration (process). These represent the key components on the journey to deliver more compelling and rewarding customer experiences. We are exploring these three pillars in a series of three blog posts.

In terms of openness, the following key findings surfaced:

• Overall, data integration remains a challenge. Only 36% of executives say they have attained real-time, highly integrated capabilities across all the customer channels within their enterprises. At this point, just half of even the most highly data-driven CX organizations consider themselves to be highly integrated. For the most part, information is managed centrally, as reported by a majority of executives. Only 14% of executives are able to report that their data is structured on a cross-functional, synchronized basis.

• Integration may be a challenge, but the pieces are in place. Many organizations have established the mechanisms needed to achieve the necessary back-end integration to deliver data-driven CX. Executives are pushing to increase the visibility of key data sources to further data-driven CX. Emails are the most often-cited source for such interactions, followed by purchases and transaction history.

• There’s a prevailing understanding that opening up data and sharing it with customers will go a long way to advancing the customer experience. The ability to extend real-time offers as customers browse a site or to show the real-time status of order shipping are powerful examples. Two in five executives agree that sharing data with customers would be beneficial “in all cases.” In most cases, customers are not looking at the same data as employees are—thereby reducing the quality of the customer experience. The ultimate measure of the openness of customer data is whether they have access to the same information as employees.

• Visibility into customer activity is low, with only a handful of enterprises (6%) currently capable of seeing the entire breadth of their customers’ experiences. Executives were asked to identify the areas of their customer experience-related processes that require the greatest visibility among customers, and complaint resolution came out on top.

The good news is that the amount of data being generated through customer experiences is growing rapidly. Ninety-eight percent of executives say the volume of this data has increased over the past 12 months, and in al- most all cases, the growth rate has topped 10%. Thirty- eight percent report that such data is growing at a rate exceeding 25% annually.