Companies have been chasing the 360-degree customer view for years. The biggest problem is that every bit of data seems to be in a different format or on a different platform. You have your website, your email offers, your customer support system, your retail store and a rewards card, not to mention your search, display, social and video advertising across the web. Many of the systems you use to track those items don’t talk to each other or even store the information in a format the other systems can use.
Data flowing in from a company’s smartphone app, for instance, might be in a completely different language than the data acquired from an email marketing campaign, a third-party vendor or from the point of sale. The average data scientist spends about 80 percent of their day preparing raw data for analysis, according to a recent poll from data mining company CrowdFlower.