Let's all repeat it together: The traditional "customer journey" is dead!

The way customers engage with brands is now dynamic and somewhat unpredictable, yet they expect to be served with a relevant experience in real time every time they interact with a brand. It can be more challenging now to really understand your customers' needs and provide the appropriate, device-centric, contextually-accurate experiences they've come to expect.

The reason for this conundrum is simple-data. Or rather, the inability of brands to make sense of their data.

Just a few years ago in 2018, more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data were created every single day, and that number is expected to reach 463 exabytes per day by 2025. (An exabyte is equal to approximately one quintillion bytes.)

This enormous amount of data includes customer behavioral, transactional, financial, and demographic data, most of which resides in silos across many different organizational and geographic boundaries. And then there are the various systems, such as CRM, POS, web analytics, service ticketing, marketing automation, commerce, and more.

This separation of customer data-and the inability to cultivate meaningful customer insights from it-is the number one barrier preventing companies from delivering exceptional customer experiences.