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With all the ballyhoo about customer experience (CX) — marketers have been talking it up for years — it’s somewhat shocking to hear that seven out of 10 marketing leaders are still developing or defining their CX strategy. We’re not even talking about ideal CX, whose horizon stretches as far as 18 months or more.

These are some of the key findings in a hot-off-the-presses CMO Council report, in collaboration with Deloitte Digital, Data-Driven Decisioning Powers CX Forward: Marketers Aiming for Ideal CX Face Data Silos and AI Skills Hurdles. That’s a long way of saying that there’s a big opportunity for marketers to jump ahead of the pack and win the CX race.

It’s important marketers show great strides in CX, too. Another CMO Council report found that more than 60% of business leaders consider the essential role of the CMO as “customer experience advocate and champion.” Pity the CMO who fails to be that champion. It might be a factor in the shrinking CMO tenure.

Related: Download the report, “Data-Driven Decisioning Powers CX Forward”

So what’s the hold up with CX? 

Ideal CX and AI is where marketers tailor messages to a customer in a way that moves the customer down the funnel, and they do so with speed, scale, prediction and learning. That’s the holy grail of marketing, and no one said it would be easy to achieve.

Truth is, ideal CX and AI require a customer data center of excellence, investment in maturing technology such as a customer data platform and analytics tools, recruitment of hard-to-find data and AI skills, and the will of top company executives to lead the charge. That last part is especially daunting, since many business executives either view AI with a skeptical eye or just don’t have the patience to give AI the time to learn and improve the CX. 

And then there’s the goliath data problem. 

Connecting data silos and content isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s continues to be the top roadblock facing marketers in their quest for ideal CX.The CMO Council found that only one in five marketers feels they have relevant data sources that are highly accessible. Without good data integration, the data supply chain and data governance may not be able to deliver a single, trusted data picture for real-time analysis. 

“What we hear from CXOs is that they have all of this data in pockets all over their organization, in IT and marketing and customer support, and don’t know how to create a through line from experience to action across all of that data,” said Michelle McGuire, national market offering leader for experience management at Deloitte Digital, in the CMO Council-Deloitte Digital report.

On the upside, the CMO Council-Deloitte Digital report found that many marketers have developed mature operational data capabilities. This includes customer performance visibility, operational reporting, and data management and governance. The advanced stuff, such as scenario trade-off simulation, predictive modeling/optimization, and robotic/cognitive automation, not so much.

For more insights and recommendations, check out the CMO Council-Deloitte Digital report here.

Related: Get ahead of the disruption! Become a CMO Council Member today!