Dive Brief:

• The vast majority of brands — 80% — find it challenging to manage customer experiences across multiple platforms, partners or providers, according to an Acxiom survey of 4,000 U.S. and UK consumers and 700 business leaders released Tuesday.
• This issue arises from departments within enterprises trying to be as efficient as possible, which in turn, can create fragmented silos that need to be better connected, according to Sean Muzzy, global president of Acxiom. Poor coordination with external partners can also hamper efforts to improve CX.
• “If I was a CX leader, I would make sure that I'm creating connectivity across the organization between the IT team, the customer service team and marketing,” Muzzy said. That’s especially true as enterprises begin to adopt AI. “I think we're at a critical juncture where teams need to look at flatter models to get the true value of AI from a CX standpoint.”

Dive Insight:

Many companies still haven’t fully connected their backend systems. As a result, it’s harder to provide seamless customer experiences, paint a complete picture of who their customers are and what they want, and roll out new technologies like AI agents.

Organizations ought to pause and assess how siloed their data actually is, Muzzy suggested.

Signs of organizations with siloed data can manifest within customer service, with customers getting transferred from agent to agent, hearing different answers to the same question or continuing to receive marketing communications after canceling service.

If the customer service platform isn’t fully integrated with billing, shipping, ordering, returns and customer relationship management systems, then the human agent can’t easily see that a customer just canceled their service — nor can an AI agent.

Siloed data is far from a unique quandary. A small minority of companies — 5% — reported having fully achieved integrations between customer-facing functions such as marketing, sales and service, according to an April KPMG survey.

Siloed systems also complicate the roll out of new technologies like AI agents.

Acxiom’s study found that brands are looking to use AI to orchestrate and manage customer interactions across multiple platforms and providers. But, respondents noted multiple challenges, from establishing accountability if something goes wrong, delivering a consistent customer experience to maintaining trust across providers.

“Is my organization set up to actually leverage these technologies to deliver a great or superior customer experience?” Muzzy said.