Lots of organisations talk about delivering a “customer centric experience” but how can you do this if you don’t really know who your customer is? By this, I am not talking about broad demographic segmentation models but quite personalised, specific information on the individual customer.

Data is at the heart of delivering this kind of experience. If you know who they are, what they buy, what content they are interested in, what their preferences are and how often they want to interact to you, it is possible to tailor the experience they have with your brand to meet these needs, deliver offers that are most relevant and increase your chances of conversion.

But how achievable is this nirvana of a singular customer view? CRM companies have been promising this for years and businesses have invested millions of dollars and thousands of head hours attempting to achieve it. Still, few companies can, hand on heart say they have a holistic data solution in place as part of their digital strategy.

The challenges that most companies face in developing a single customer view seems to be driven by the volume of legacy data systems that need to be integrated and whether or not this integration needs to be in real time or not.

But having the systems that enable data to be consolidated in one place is only the first step in a holistic data strategy. No matter how much information you have on an individual is useless unless you have the business logic in place to connect the data elements together, understanding of relationships between these elements and determine outcomes in terms of the customer experience.

Because data is often collected from a wide range of areas within an organisation, including the digital and interactive mediums, and the return on the knowledge may be recognised in a different part of the organisation to where the data collection needs to take place, motivating people to maintain good data practices and managing the expectations of ROI can sometimes be difficult. If the call centre is measured by how many calls they can process and the CRM system slows them down, were is the incentive to use it properly?

Additionally, perhaps the most important thing that a data strategy has to include is the ability to learn and evolve. People change, trends evolve and consumer demand shifts. Analytics need to not only measure the effectiveness of communications, content or offers but also identify changes that are occurring and how an organisation might need to adapt and evolve to meet these shifts.

Data is the key to truly understanding your customers. It is easy to become overwhelmed with the data that is available and lazy about how you collect and look at it but the future of our industry will no doubt begin to rely more and more heavily on the insights it delivers to improve our businesses and the relationships we have with our customers.

There’ll be some good debate around this in the panel session at ad:tech: What Are The Possibilities That An Holistic Data Strategy Brings To Your Business? The panellists for that session are:

Kevin Mackin, General Manager, Coremetrics
Sean Smith, Head of Brand and Communications, HotelClub.com, Orbitz Worldwide
Leila Seith Hassan, Senior Marketing Analyst, Datalicious
Michael Kustreba, VP Australia and New Zealand, Epsilon International

They’ll be sharing their points of view. You can pose some questions or share your thoughts here.