Report: Data Issues Plague Marketers Seeking to Improve the Customer Experience

More marketers are leveraging customer data platforms (CDP) to provide a personalized experience. However, new research suggests that the data in these platforms is often flawed, making it challenging to deliver an optimal experience to customers.

Merkle recently published its “2022 Q3 Customer Engagement Report,” and statistics indicated that most marketers (27.1%) cite implementation as the biggest barrier when it comes to utilizing a CDP. However, 23.7% stated that the lack of clean, reliable data in their system is their largest CDP issue. Other barriers included a lack of foundational customer data (16.2%) and an inability to integrate data from multiple systems (17.2%).

“While their power and promise have helped CDPs take the industry by storm, those promises are often vague and poorly understood,” wrote the authors of the report. “A key misconception stems from vendor claims that their CDP can fully solve for data issues and provide brands with a robust consumer 360.”

Leveraging Marketing Data for Customer Insight

Although marketers have struggled with leveraging data, previous research indicates that they still find it useful for mapping the customer journey and understanding the customer experience.

Ascend2 conducted the “Using Data-Driven Marketing to Predict Future Performance” report, and data suggested that the majority of marketers (48%) now consider data-driven marketing to be most useful for customer journey mapping and the customer experience. In turn, 40% intend to moderately increase their data-driven marketing budget within the next year.

Most marketers (58%) believe that improving the customer experience with data will become critical to decision-making.