Marketers are under pressure to perform for both customers andbusinesses, from showing the link between customer experience and commercialsuccess to understanding which metrics count. 

According to Eve Sleep CEO Cheryl Calverley, chasing a tidy datasetin order to achieve a single customer view might lead to a sense of "falsecorrectness." Calverley, a former CMO and marketing executive with two decades of experience, feels that organizations waste time trying to create the cleanest dataset possible, only to discover months later that they could have gotten the same conclusions by recognizing the indications in front of them. 

“There can be an exercise in tidiness where everyone spends theirentire life chasing the tidiest possible data view,” she said. “You get to areally tidy data view and you go ‘Brilliant, so it tells us exactly what it told us four months ago when it was messy, that clearly the issue is the deliveries are running low and the packaging isn't working correctly,” she said. 

“Four months ago, you could have said that because you could see thecommotion. There's a hint of almost-data that gives the impression of falseprecision. It's pointless to be 100 percent accurate; 85 percent accuracy is sufficient.” 

Calverley advises marketers to recognize when it's time to"give up the chase" for data perfection and instead get everyone inthe company to agree on which aspects of the customer experience need to be addressed. The next stage is to come up with a coordinated approach to address the problems. “You need to lock yourself in a room and say, 'We've heard there's an issue with the packaging, a problem with the delivery lead times, and a complaint about the instructions on the product sites.' “Are we all in agreement that those are the three things we'll focus on, and the other 42 things are secondary?” she said. 

“It's faster and more efficient to synthesize it through humaninteraction and collaboration than it is to try to synthesize it into a singlepiece of data.” Carly O'Brien, CMO of the Very Group, believes that it is vital to simplify customer experience data in a form that is “consumable” for colleagues across the organization, and that having a “really clean dataset” helps. However, O'Brien is wary of firms looking for a singular consumer voice because customers express themselves in a variety of ways. 

“There are bits of it all across the organization, whether it'sTrustpilot, social media comments, what you hear through your contact center,or the evaluations customers leave. “What we're really trying to do from a cultural standpoint is create a wonderful customer experience, and we need to consume all of those inputs across all sectors of the business to be able to truly comprehend and drive forward what we're hearing from our customers,” she stated. 

“It's tough to condense it into a single answer to the issue becausedifferent elements of the business are asking different questions at differenttimes, and you have to draw on all of those inputs. We see it as having access to the proper information and disseminating it in a way that is useful to the colleague who has to make the change.