Let’s say that Anna Johnson browsed your website. You’ve captured that data point. She also walked into one of your retail locations and completed a transaction. That’s another data point. And she made a customer service call—data point number three.

If you’re like many businesses, rather than giving you a three-dimensional view of your customer, these interactions give you three unconnected Anna Johnsons in three siloed datasets. To get actionable insights from your customer data, you need to gather your data on individual customers into unique profiles, stored in a single location. And then, you need to continuously match customer interactions with the right Anna Johnson to build robust data to give Anna the marketing messages that pique her interest. Harnessing customer data is essential because consumer attention is fragmented.

You might have a tiny window of time, perhaps just a minute or two, to get information in front of someone’s eyeballs. Without a targeted message that speaks