Everywhere you turn marketers are talking about big data. Everyone is going on about how it can predict the future.

Tech giants like Apple, Amazon and Google know how to use their data to talk to customers in the way customers want to be spoken to. The Economist even published a story a few years back titled, “The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data.” 

Yet when you look at how big data is used for personalization in marketing, you quickly realize that the promise of big data is more buzz than practical reality. According to McKinsey only 15% of CMO’s believe their company is on the right track with personalization. Daniel Ariely, the renowned behavioral economist, tweeted “Big data is like teenage sex: everyone talks about it; nobody really knows how to do it; everyone thinks everyone else is doing it; so everyone claims they are doing it.” 

Data is the foundational element that can make your customer experience (CX) so powerful, but at the same time it’s also one of the most underutilized assets in organizations. Every marketer has data assets that could be put to better use, however most are only using a fraction of the information they’ve collected. Why is that? 

Data is just the beginning

As you might have noticed, it’s much easier to collect data than it is to create value from it. Getting consent from a customer to use their data is not hard, however it’s unbelievably difficult to translate insights from data into actionable next steps and do this at scale. 

Many organizations lack the technical infrastructure to store, secure and manage all of their customers’ data. On top of that most don’t have the budget to hire teams of experts for interpretation and analysis. Others, on the other hand, are so overwhelmed by data and ignore the potential altogether by not investing any time or resources at all.
 
Our advice would be to start small. After all, it’s not about the size of your data, but what you do with it that counts. Start with your business objective and key questions you’re trying to answer. Look at what kind of data you need to collect to answer those questions and which data is already available. Work from there to set up a solid data strategy that uses relevant and quality data to improve your CX.

We often compare creating a data-driven organization with building a house. Before you start laying the bricks, you have to make sure you have a strong foundation, suitable to build on. If the foundation is not right, your roof will start leaking, the walls will start cracking and eventually there will be a lot of painful fixes to be made further down the line. 

Data plays a crucial role in your CX and helps you understand the wants and needs of your customers. It’s time to use data more effectively to improve and tailor your customer journeys - otherwise what’s the point of collecting it all? 

Written by Ben Verschuur, Head of Performance at DPDK Digital Agency 

The original article can be found at https://dpdk.com/stories/digging-cx-gold-unleash-your-data