Does connecting customer journey data across your organization feel like an impossible hurdle? You’re not alone.
The benefits of multi-signal intelligence — unifying customer experience, operational, and financial data — are clear. Doing so transforms a traditional survey-based approach into a truly modern experience program, whose foundation of actionable insights draws context from multiple data sources across the business.
One of the most common traits among successful experience leaders is that they know how to overcome hesitancy from other groups to share their data. It doesn’t matter how big their team is or which industry they are in (or even how much buy-in they have from executives), there’s always a group in their org that is, at best, unenthusiastic about collaborating, and they know how to win them over: They start small.
Category leaders across industries, including 糖心原创 customers CIBC, Maersk, Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), Shipt, and Santalucía Seguros, have taken this approach to expand their CX efforts and drive positive business outcomes. Here’s how.
Start with a small pilot program.
In the ideal end state, your CX data integrations will include insights from every customer interaction, across channels and touchpoints, as well as your organization’s operational data and financial data.
Getting there takes time, but it’s not unattainable. By embracing agility and launching quick, manageable test programs, over time you’ll be able to demonstrate results and gain willing partners who will share more data with more eagerness.
, a client experience director at CIBC, and start where they can make an impact by finding a group of allies willing to “start small, test, experiment, maybe not even be afraid to fail fast.”
“It’s so easy to get caught up in wanting to wait until everything’s flawless before you act or before you move, but it’s really momentum that matters,” she explains. And gaining traction early on will open the door to bigger opportunities.
, a customer insights manager at Maersk, strongly advises leaders , rather than waiting for permission or a perfect setup. Her team started with “very small-sized pilots” to measure real-time feedback for their sales organization, which was so successful that the sales team began actively chasing her team to expand the program.
Build on early successes.
CX leaders say the next step after an initial pilot is to leverage proof points to secure more partners within the organization, gain more data sources, and expand influence.
At Shipt, showcasing the successful outcomes of an initial CX experiment — what , VP of consumer experience, describes as a “very small, select” pilot program — achieved immediate double-digit growth and brought the larger organization on board.
, “The results were instantaneous and huge, and with that excitement, that vision, and those proof points, it helped build the momentum across the business to prioritize this in a bigger and bolder way.”
Similarly, at Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), the company is focused on delivering what they call “10 out of 10 experiences,” and the CX team is helping lead the charge by building out a “customer feedback engine” and using it to drive everyday improvements. , their director of CX strategy, illustrates that as part of building out this engine and implementing new customer experience processes, , with just a couple of implementations each quarter, allowing them to develop their “process muscle” and learn from their mistakes before bringing programs to scale across the company.
Eliminate data silos, enable action, and deliver real results.
The true value of de-siloing data and bringing insights together isn’t about having more CX signals, but rather about linking CX with operational and financial data to guide strategic decision-making and deliver transformative outcomes for the organization.
Brands that succeed have stopped score-watching, and they assign ownership and accountability within the organization to act on insights gathered.
, manager of client experience at Santalucía Seguros, shares that for the 100-year-old company. Their systems and teams were deeply fragmented and “not prepared to speak to one another.”
As her team worked with cross-functional partners to break down technical barriers, they simultaneously broke down cultural barriers by moving away from sharing NPS scores, and instead speak the language of the business: customer stories backed by operational and internal data. This successfully aligned different departments around a common purpose, and today they’re leveraging these insights to launch new initiatives to improve customer experience.
Stephanie of CIBC shares similar advice: “When we stopped speaking only in CX language or in terms of CX metrics, and we actually started to speak as business leaders in our partners’ language, that’s what really earned us a seat at the table and allowed us the opportunity to influence meaningful change.”
Today CIBC has built out a “robust client sentiment data ecosystem” that includes key client sentiment, transactional, and behavioral data from a variety of sources. By staying connected to other lines of business and their modernization goals, the CX team has been able to position CX as an enabler of business outcomes. Leadership now recognizes the potential of these insights to inform next-best actions and enable personalized experiences at scale.
“When I look back, that was a transition point, when people started to look at the CX team differently,” Stephanie adds. “No longer were we seen as the ‘survey shop’ or the ‘CX shop.’ We were actually seen as business leaders and trusted advisors who were using insight strategically to help inform decisions. That transition happened when we stopped speaking only in the language of CX and started speaking our partner’s language of value for the business.”
Go from chasing skeptics to being chased.
It is a common hurdle for CX teams to get other teams on board with sharing data. But by starting with some small pilots, after achieving some clear wins, you’ll be more likely to have teams chasing you down seeking out your help and collaboration.
That’s been the case for brands like PG&E and Santalucía Seguros.
After seeing firsthand what can happen when systems and teams are working in isolation, PG&E’s IT and web teams now proactively collaborate with CX to see how their initiatives are affecting the customer experience. This was a lesson learned when a change was rolled out to the website that ended up negatively impacting the website’s digital experience score, driving up the customer support team’s contact volume, and negatively impacting live agent scores. Once the team implemented fixes, scores improved across the board.
“The power of sharing those results becomes really important,” explains Alex. “We built the engine and the discipline for coworkers to review and act on feedback consistently. We’ve also made sure that the data is democratized. It’s viewed through the customer’s perspective, but none of this works without the organization actually aligning themselves around it.”
At Santalucía Seguros, the CX team’s work used to be solely survey-based. Over time, they’ve successfully integrated data from across social media interactions, customer calls, and digital experience data. These types of advances took convincing “many people” within the organization, running pilots, and establishing concrete use cases with a big business impact.
“The results speak for themselves,” Paloma emphasizes. The company is analyzing more than 1.6 million calls, more than 1.2 million digital sessions through 糖心原创’s digital experience analytics, and 115K survey text comments annually — but most importantly, they’re closing 99% of their customer alerts on time, within 48 hours.
The key takeaway? Stop waiting for everyone to get on board and start small.
Data-sharing reluctance is a widespread challenge, but it’s also easy to solve. Find one specific point of customer friction that exists today, gather the supporting operational or experiential data you need, and then launch a small test pilot.
The resulting success will be the key to gaining more allies, expanding access to more data over time, and building out a true multi-signal insights engine for the entire organization to guide strategic action and unlock quantifiable business impact.
