Most of us have had at least one horrible customer experience caused by a company's poor data management practices. An ill-timed marketing email sent while you were dealing with a service issue, receiving a message clearly tailored for someone else, learning of a data breach-the list goes on and on. All these examples illustrate the importance of effectively managing your customer data across the entire company.

But customer data can be hard to organize. There's so much to keep track of and so many systems to dig through to find it-some of which don't even talk to one another! These challenges make it difficult to reconcile your data, understand it, and most importantly, put it to good use. However, your customers have experienced truly personalized service, and now they expect it everywhere. Keeping them as customers means offering the same-or better-level of customer service, no matter the channel.