Breaking Silos: Why Data Must Flow for Better CX

Today, we mark major holidays and traditions with a purchase. Or if you're anything like me, you celebrate insignificant events with a pointless purchase online. While core holidays, birthdays, and festivals drive our spending habits, there's another category of "holidays" that has revolutionized how we shop.

Enter Amazon Prime Day.

Of course, there are other global sales days if your loyalties lie elsewhere. Black Friday stands as another testament to our shopping fervor – a day when online and in-person storefronts slash their prices and welcome a sea of eager customers racing against time to grab the best deals.

The numbers tell a compelling story: global e-commerce sales are projected to reach approximately $6.86 trillion in 2025, marking an 8.37% increase from 2024. This upward trajectory shows no signs of slowing, with sales expected to surge past $8 trillion by 2027.

Believe it or not, Amazon Prime Day alone recorded over 300 million purchases in 2024!

Imagine eagerly tracking the price of a PS5 on your favorite retailer's website, patiently waiting for the upcoming sales day promising a 40% discount. For days, it's all you see – splashed across the home screen, following you through targeted ads, building your anticipation to a fever pitch.

But when the big day finally arrives, you're met with the dreaded "Out of Stock" message on the very same product that's still being advertised everywhere on the site. You're left frantically searching for other retailers, hoping to find the console at your target price. If only you hadn't been bombarded with those ads or had been notified about the limited stock before getting your hopes up!

This scenario perfectly illustrates how crucial seamless data flow is across all organizational touchpoints. Centralizing data and making it accessible throughout the organization isn't just a luxury – it's fundamental to success, particularly in delivering the exceptional customer experiences that today's consumers expect.

Better access to data, with the help of AI, empowers teams across functions to work together more efficiently. The true strength of an organization lies in how quickly data can be shared across it, to provide insights and enhance customer value. 

The power of shared data

Have you ever heard the phrase "another set of eyes can only add value"? When it comes to organizations and data, this couldn't be more accurate. Data flowing across an organization enables multiple experts to identify and understand recurring pain points and solve them more quickly.

Unlike passing around a plate of cookies at a birthday party, data flow is more nuanced. It moves across levels, adding insight, value, and perspective at every step.

Siloed data in e-commerce can create costly operational nightmares. Imagine you run an e-commerce store and launch a flash sale on winter boots, promoting a hefty 30% discount across all brands. The campaign is a hit – orders start to flood in. But your inventory management system isn’t in sync with your e-commerce platform, which means there’s no one giving you real-time updates on your stock status. What happens next is painful: oversold inventory, hundreds of cancellation emails to disappointed customers, and a social media backlash that takes weeks to contain.

This scenario doesn't just hurt your immediate sales – it damages your brand reputation and customer trust, potentially costing you long-term revenue and repeat business.

Cross-team insights powered by GenAI

Washington advocates for shared display dashboards. For instance, a dashboard showing social conversations about a product serves different purposes for different teams.

Marketing teams use it for social care, monitoring conversations and keywords related to their offerings. Meanwhile, product managers and developers might look at the same data to identify needed features, tweak the product, or implement UI improvements.

The free flow of data across an organization will enable every team within that organization to extract relevant, contextual insights while working toward the common goal of improving customer experience.

During major e-commerce sales days, seamless access to data becomes even more crucial as the company needs to track, ship, and record millions of sales within 24 hours. Multiple teams – inventory, digital marketing, customer care, and sales – must work in perfect harmony to fulfill orders and ensure customer satisfaction.

This is where AI can step in as the great enabler, helping your organization un-silo customer data and provide crucial visibility across the board. When integrated into your CX workflows, AI allows you to:

• Foster cross-functional collaboration through shared team insights
• Maintain a high-level view of all organizational functions
• Unlock cross-departmental insights
• Address pain points faster

With Sprinklr Display’s easy-to-use interface, your team can create powerful visualizations of real-time data on a wide range of solutions through automatic data gathering, cleaning, and integration from various sources, and the built-in AI creates a unified dataset that breaks down traditional barriers.

Conclusion

When the next major sales day rolls around - whether it's Prime Day, Black Friday, or the next big thing - pause for a moment to consider the intricate dance happening behind your "Add to Cart" click.

Every successful purchase represents countless teams working in harmony, powered by data flowing as smoothly as your payment transaction. After all, in a world where a single sales day can generate 300 million purchases, the difference between success and failure isn't just about having the right products at the right price - it's about having the right information in the right hands at exactly the right moment. That's the true power of unified, AI-driven data flow. And for businesses ready to embrace it, the possibilities are limitless.

For more insights, check out Vincent Washington’s full video below.