Marketers are still struggling to integrate customer data, and in March 2015 polling by Signal, just 6% worldwide said they had a single view of all customers and prospects across devices and touchpoints, while one-third had nothing in place.
For the most part, respondents were using fragmented, incomplete and complex approaches to building a single view. One-third of marketers used a combination of in-house solutions, and the same percentage leveraged a mix of in-house and outside resources. Just 16% had built their own technology customized to their needs.
Similarly, poor tools and technologies were a critical barrier to the formation of a single customer view. Just 8% of respondents who had a solution in place said they had a complete set of capabilities that were effective. Meanwhile, seven in 10 had tools with gaps in capabilities and effectiveness, with 8% saying these were major.
As a result of incomplete solutions, merging profile fragments as data became available (57%) and collecting data across channels (55%) were the two biggest roadblocks to building a single customer profile. And unsurprisingly, this meant most marketers didn’t get a complete cross-channel view. Just 15% saying they had coverage across all channels they wanted and collected sufficient data from those channels. In comparison, 30% said they didn’t have sufficient cross-channel coverage but collected data where they could, while 25% had the reverse issue: coverage across all channels, but poor data collection.
While it would be nice if there was one solution to save them all, Signal noted that single-view technologies are still siloed, meaning marketers must integrate various tools and build their own solutions that encompass everything they need.
December 2014 Winterberry Group findings support this. Nearly 61% of marketers in North America said better integration of their existing tools would enable them to make better use of data technology, and the same percentage said improved processes for sharing data among various tools would do the same.