Data is immensely important to the modern practice of customer engagement. But data is more than just some stodgy technical resource. Data represents insight that people can use to make judgements and evaluate contexts. It enables experts to connect the dots and make customer experiences more fruitful. And data is an accessory to a collection of very human and complex processes. It must flow freely within organizations so that it can help people make sense of situations. Leaving data to pool in unattended silos is counter-productive, and such restriction can keep your most experienced and talented people in the dark. That’s unfortunate whenever it occurs, but within the customer experience (CX), it has particularly widespread consequences.
The CX process is a sequence of events that reflects which team is responsible at each moment of the customer journey. Those teams may come from different parts of the organization (marketing departments and contact centers, to name just two), and might well have different key performance indicators and agendas—but they shouldn’t operate in isolation. Without contextual awareness of what everyone else is doing and how the customer is reacting along the way, each team risks operating in a bubble, surrounded only by the kinds of data they are most comfortable using and unaware of important information that may be hiding in someone else’s data.
