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Robert Tas shares key tips on how to personalize the customer journey.

Today we constantly see the importance of customer experience and personalization at the top of CMOs’ agendas; yet I am stunned by our lack of progress. In a recent study conducted by Pega and the CMO Council, Predicting Routes to Revenue, less than three percent of CMOs reported feeling comfortable with their impact on maximizing the lifetime value of the customer. A further 45 percent of CMOs said they are challenged by not having the tools and capabilities to determine customer value, which limits their ability to make proper business decisions.

Given advances in technology over the past decade, why are we still struggling to drive better customer journeys? In my experience, there are three major obstacles organizations face when trying to crack the customer centric code:

Organizations are missing data and are not prioritizing their assets to get the most complete view of the customer, resulting in a failure to have a 360 degree view of all historical customer interactions in one central place. Data usually falls into silos, like campaigns or customer service, but is rarely integrated to further provide customer context.

Organizations lack integration across their legacy technology systems, which prevents them from delivering an end-to-end customer journey. It is no longer enough to just link data; process, business rules, and workflow must also be end-to-end.

Organizations lack an ethos or culture to put the customer first. Employee incentives are not tied to the behaviors needed to drive better customer experience. Marketing organizations have typically been set up with a channels focus like web or email, where the channel is the primary consideration for optimization. Another example is the product centric structure, in which product groups compete for customer attention. These constructs make it difficult to prioritize the customer’s needs first.

Read the full post, Removing Friction: Key to personalizing the customer journey, on LinkedIn.