hat fragmentation makes it really difficult to create a comprehensive customer profile that reflects all the interactions the retailer has with them,” says Meredith Mitchell, industry marketing lead for retail and ecommerce at Braze, a leading customer engagement platform that allows marketers to creatively engage with customers in real time, across channels from one platform. “One of the biggest opportunities today is integrating data from all those sources to create a unified view of the customer.”

Data silos are a particularly acute problem for retailers with outdated technology. “That really hinders data integration efforts,” says Mitchell. “Trying to connect legacy systems to new technology is a challenge, so you have marketers that are trying to create a multi-channel strategy with systems that just aren’t able to compete at that level.”