This is guest post from Joyce Kim, Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio.

It was in 2006 that the British mathematician Clive Humby uttered the now legendary phrase, “Data is the new oil.”

Nearly two decades later, companies are drilling for more data about their businesses than ever before. At a minimum, any modern business is expected to process and collect data from its website, mobile apps, retail stores, contact centers, and much, much more.

But more data doesn’t always equal better customer experiences. Despite the average company managing 162.9 TB of data, Gartner has identified a worrying statistic: 97% of that data will remain unused across the organization.

This tells us that what businesses are in dire need of isn’t more data; it’s more strategy.

Your data strategy is what makes order out of massive volumes of data available to your business, and ensures that data is wielded successfully by each and every department.

Consider the experience of a large Fortune 500 company our team worked with to illustrate just how pernicious the absence of a data strategy can be. In a quest to become a data-driven enterprise, the company embarked on an expensive, multi-year project to extract, clean, and aggregate all the data in its systems.

Unfortunately, they failed to align their efforts to the real business use cases throughout the organization, meaning sales, service, and marketing teams still couldn’t act on and access the data needed for their customer experience efforts.

Despite millions of dollars spent, a lack of strategic, upfront planning saw the problems within their organization become even more entrenched – that of data silos.

Struggles of the past and present

A data silo occurs when one department in an organization collects or has access to data that another department does not. And they’re almost ubiquitous in mid-sized to large businesses.

If you’ve ever worked in marketing or CX for a large organization, I’m certain the following scenario sounds familiar: marketing uses one tool for campaign automation, the sales team uses a different tool for outbound campaigns, and the customer service team will use another tool for email support.

That’s three different tools, with three entirely different datasets.

Left unchecked, the data trapped within each of these tools will grow increasingly disjointed, impacting everyday customer experiences. Your call center agents may try to sell your best customers products they already have. Your marketing team may blast campaign emails to a customer on the verge of churn.

Inefficient and incomplete customer experiences may be the most far-reaching effects of data silos, but they’re not the only ones.

Forrester estimates that data silos eat up 2.4 hours from the average employee’s workday, by forcing them to search for information that should be at their fingertips. Additionally, in a world where data trust and transparency are paramount, data silos increase the likelihood that sensitive data is being mishandled.

Say heave-ho to the silo

So where do organizations start on the journey of breaking down the data silos within their organizations? First, it must be acknowledged that true data strategy requires cultural as well as technological changes.

Only by tackling both can future silos be prevented.

Culture

Allow me to adapt a quote from the legendary management consultant, Peter Drucker: “Culture eats technology for breakfast”.

If the culture within your organization is misaligned, no amount of technology will prevent silos from occurring. That’s why CX leaders should start by tackling the big-picture, cultural changes that cause data silos to happen in the first place.

The cultural fixes in your company might be as straightforward as good ol’ fashion communication. It could be something more troubling, like disparate teams working with tunnel vision.

Whatever the symptom, one particularly successful tactic (used by brands like Domino’s) is to assign the role of “Data Champion” within your organization.

The Data Champion ensures that Sales, Service, and Marketing (as well as your R&D teams) are aligned on a unified, standard vision for data across the organization, and helps hold these teams accountable in upholding agreed-upon data standards.

With a steward for your data-centric culture in place, you’ll be ready to tackle the technology shift required to eradicate silos once and for all.

Technology

Historically, customer-facing technology has been “channel-centric”. Data is organized and siloed according to the channel where it was created, accessible to only a fraction of the organization.

Given the technological age we live in, this may seem like an antiquated way to work.

Unfortunately, it’s still the reality for many businesses. Data from e-commerce can’t speak to data from retail. Retail data can’t speak to contact center data. Add in the fact that the average business now uses over 211 different pieces of software, it’s not hard to see how data silos occur.

In such a situation, you may need to consider investing in technology (such as a customer data platform) that makes data integration and data sharing easy. Such technology unifies previously siloed data, arming your customer-facing teams (and the disparate tools they use) with the same underlying dataset.

It means your sales, marketing, and service teams have real-time, consistent information on the person they’re talking to – leading to better conversations and happier customers.

We may be living in an age where data is the new oil. But like oil, data needs to be processed and refined to be valuable.

This “refinement” requires a combination of culture and technology change within your organization. Otherwise, you’re putting your company’s most precious resource to waste.

This is guest post from Joyce Kim, Chief Marketing Officer at Twilio.

About Joyce

As Chief Marketing Officer, Joyce leads global marketing as Twilio executes its vision of becoming the leader in the emerging customer engagement category. Joyce brings over two decades of experience scaling commercial innovation and growth in the technology sector through large scale digital transformation and brand elevation strategies. Her expertise spans all facets of Go-To-Market including digital, brand, communications, channels and product strategy for global technology and SaaS companies.

Previously, she served as the Chief Marketing Officer for Genesys and was responsible for driving market expansion and revenue diversification strategies including customer acquisition, engagement and channel growth.

Joyce is passionate about increasing brand value and revenue growth by advancing a data-driven organization and demonstrates her thought leadership as an active member of the CMO Council, Executive Council Member of the Forbes CMO Practice, Wall Street Journal CMO Network, and as part of the Fast Company Executive Board. She also serves as a member of the board of directors and the audit committee at Quicklogic corporation (QUIK), and member of the board for Bring Me A Book, a non-profit focused on bringing the joy and transformational power of books to all children in under-resourced communities.

Joyce has two bachelor of science degrees in Business Finance and Architecture from California Polytechnic State University.

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