Data integration plays a pivotal role in enabling organizations to harness the full potential of their data and gain valuable insights. However, with the ever-expanding data landscape and diverse data sources, data integration challenges have become more complex and varied in recent months.
Data Integration Challenges Increased by 6%
According to Omdia’s annual State of Digital CX 2023, which surveyed 241 customer experience professionals in the United States and Canada, earlier this year, data integration challenges have increased since Omdia’s 2022 survey. For example, when asked about the biggest challenges in leveraging data in their organizations, the percentage of respondents who reported they were challenged by data integration rose from 42% in 2022 to 48% this year.
Data integration challenges don’t bode well for delivering orchestrated and relevant customer experiences. Coordinated and optimized engagement requires alignment of unified customer data across channels, as well as across relevant business functions within an enterprise to deliver a consistent, personalized, and valued experience to the customer.
The Main Reason for the Increase? Data Proliferation
However, Omdia’s research signals a trend that enterprises’ data integration challenges are worsening. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been significant acceleration in the digitization efforts of enterprises. While recent digital acceleration efforts opened new opportunities, it also created myriad data challenges, especially with data integration. That’s because in the rush to digitize, enterprises have expanded their customer channels and increased data sources. This has resulted in the proliferation of data.
For example, the shift to remote work has led to increased adoption of video conferencing and collaboration tools. Growing deployments of such applications have generated substantial data from virtual meetings. Additionally, the expansive use of messaging apps, email, and social media platforms have increased. According to Omdia’s State of Digital CX 2023 survey, respondents indicated that email served as the channel enterprises have interact with customers the most over the past year. Furthermore, respondents reported both significant and modest increases across all customer channels, with live chat representing the largest increase, representing a 52% jump in usage.
Social media also saw a combined 37% in significant and modest usage increases. This underscores how social media has changed from sites where younger communities gather, to platforms today where people of all ages regularly conduct business, socialize, data, and engage with brands. Estimates place the number of global social media users at 4.8 billion. TikTok alone reports more than 1 billion monthly users for 2023.
Consequently, as consumers increasingly interact with companies from a wide range of digital channels, it is becoming more difficult for enterprises to collect, manage, and integrate data from the expanding collection of touchpoints due to the vast amounts of data that need to be integrated and analyzed effectively. Such complexity can stall the effectiveness of digital CX applications, scalability, and ultimately the ability to realize value.
Streamlining success
Data integration is a powerful tool for fixing data complexity and it’s foundational to effective customer experience orchestration. By understanding and proactively addressing these challenges through centralized data management, using the right integration tools, and automating processes, enterprises can simplify data handling, streamline decision-making, and unlock valuable insights from their data. Ultimately, they will empower data-driven decision-making and drive business growth.
Encouragingly, Omdia’s research points to a recognition among enterprises of the value of both collecting customer insights and improving data integration efforts to achieve business growth. When asked about the strategic responses they are undertaking to improve omnichannel engagement, 66% reported a commitment to developing deeper customer insights. This represents an increase from last year’s study which showed only 37% of respondents wanted to develop deeper insights. This result not only further signals that data is disconnected and inaccessible, but it also shows that companies recognize their data shortcomings and plan to remedy them.
As consumers continue to engage across multiple digital touchpoints, enterprises must address their data integration challenges to create a unified view of customer interactions. Successfully navigating these challenges can empower companies to secure a foothold in the evolving and dynamic digital landscape.
To read the full The State of Digital CX 2023 report and more, go to www.omdia.com.
