Why is getting a 360-degree view of customers elusive for many organizations??

Why is it so difficult for organizations to get a truly 360-degree view of their customers and realize the benefits of higher sales and better customer experience? Is it technology, data, organizational structure / processes? I have shared some of my thoughts below and welcome comments ...

Organizations have long known the merits of better understanding their customer - getting a 360-degree view. Common sense tells us that this leads to higher degree of customer satisfaction, lower churn and higher sales. This is much more relevant in the digital world that we live in. Digital is all about driving higher customer satisfaction, building loyalty / long term relationships and enabling higher sales and profitability. In this digital world, there is more data than ever before about the customer. In addition to the traditional data sources, today there is so much more data available about customers from non-traditional sources. It should be much easier to get a better, a more complete profile of the customer and realize the benefits. So, why is it so difficult for organizations to truly achieve a 360-degree view of the customer ??

So, let's examine each of the 3-4 enablers to achieve a complete view of customers....There is no shortage of data on customers. In addition to data available from traditional sources, there is wealth of data available from social media, transactional data, unstructured documents, etc. Technology to manage all of this data is not a challenge. Big data technology has made it possible to manage the huge volume and variety of data that is available today. The tools to analyze this data and draw inferences or intelligence from this data is also available. There are sophisticated analytical tools available today to process the structured and unstructured data to provide strategic insight that is useful to organizations. 

Then, what is the problem? Challenges in achieving this 360-degree view of the customer are not technology or data or availability of analytical tools, but it is the ability of organizations to bring it all together. Data is still very siloed in many organizations. It is not uncommon to see organizations that have customer data in more than one CRM system. Integrating customer data from multiple interaction channels such as phone, email, social media etc across product silos is still challenging for many organizations. Some organizations have started converting their call centers to customer command centers and integrate the data across all channels. There are significant costs involved in this effort as well. Consolidating platforms, integrating the data, implementing analytical tools, bringing in data scientists to "mine' the data, all of these can be quite expensive. Organizational alignment and internal customer buy-in is also elusive in some organization. Some organizations point to the lack of good industrial strength "platform" or “solutions" from vendors to achieve these objectives in a cost effective manner. 

It is not to say that no organization has been able to achieve 360-degree view of their customers and drive higher levels of customer satisfaction. Those that have achieved success point to executive sponsorship, alignment of organizational objectives, higher degree of focus on customer experience and simpler technology landscape as the enablers for success.