Customer experience truth: 80% right better than 3 months late

There’s a truth in customer experience management brought about by rapidly changing technology—marketers are better off 80% right today than 100% right three months from now. Today’s marketing math delivers better results from fast turnaround with good data rather than perfect data that takes far too long to assemble. Traditional marketing approaches looking for perfect data segments simply aren’t competitive any longer.

Intersection of Big Data and Real-Time Information

The math has changed because of a combination of new technologies like mobile, social, and in-memory storage, all creating and managing enormous amounts of data that feeds remarkably powerful analytics. At the intersection of Big Data and real-time information, marketers are finding that analytics changes the game of interactions in the moments that count, in the context of the customer.

Visualization and self-discovery performed against a growing list of available digital information shows patterns we could never see before that allow us to test and learn with every interaction. But there are challenges to taking full advantage of marketing’s new math. The biggest challenge comes from the fact that customer data is found in many places, never in just one.

Customer Systems Evolved Separately

As computerization of commerce progressed over the past few decades, the many things we need to know to provide the best customer experience evolved separately. Information today is stored in many disparate systems, which are even located both on and off premise. Waiting for change won’t help—no monolithic system is going to show up that can replace what already exists, and anything that does is too rigid to be useful as consumers and markets evolve rapidly.

Connecting The Dots

This is precisely why integration is hot technology for marketers, feeding analytics with all kinds of current and historical information that allows marketers to be mostly right very quickly—right enough and fast enough to make a difference.

Discover how companies are making up with volume and speed what they lack in accuracy and completeness. Download the whitepaper Top 10 Marketing Trends for 2014.

The following was first posted on the Loyalty Lab Blog and has been lightly edited.