Want to Understand the Customer Journey? Tackle your Data Silos

Over 50 percent of IT and marketing employees believe that data silos are still the biggest barrier stopping organisations obtaining definitive insights from data.

This is according to UK-based chip processor and semiconductor designer Arm, in a study produced by its recently acquired data management platform Treasure Data.

It also found that over 60 percent of organisations have at least three customer touchpoints pre-purchase, with some reporting up to six touchpoints.

The report found that: “Some organizations are barely able to scratch the surface of their customer journey data, let alone build a complete picture of the typical customer journey by persona. Fragmented data and a lack of in-house data-analysis skills are a significant barrier to data-driven marketing.”

Much of the information and data gleamed during these interaction is being lost or moved to siloed locations. Strikingly nearly half of those surveyed admitted that they didn’t use a formal attribution strategy, which has made it very difficult to identify what method resulted in a sale.

The Customer Journey Can’t Be Tracked in Data Silos

Yet the report notes that businesses aren’t just struggling with getting its siloed data in order. Many are failing to robustly understand their customers, as gaps in employee data analytic skills and technology resources are obscuring how the customer interacts with organisations.

A strong recommendation from the report is that organisations should strive to find and hire data-driven people, providing them with “platforms that make it easier to find data insights, such as dashboards and easy-to-use analytics, so they can explore data and communicate their insights to the larger organization.”

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It also states that: “While more data scientist jobs have been created in the past 10 years, the role hasn’t become widely held. And just because a company has a data scientist on the team doesn’t mean that person is available for regular analysis of marketing data.”

The report concludes that in recent years customer journeys have gone longer and more complex resulting in a need for companies to re-examine how they view all the data they hold.

It suggest that they: “Break down data silos. Integrate the data you already collect. Helpful marketing technology, such as customer data platforms (CDPs), combine data from many sources, online and off, to create a full picture of the different customer journeys your buyers and prospects take.”

“With more unified data you can find out what compels customers to buy and why.”

It has been said before, elsewhere, and Computer Business Review is sure it will be said again: understanding your customer journey through data is crucial to success in an increasingly competitive, and global commercial world, and there are plenty of tools to help businesses do precisely that.

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