When every major player in an industry offers a similar set of core products or services, CX is the only point of differentiation. And, when other avenues for business growth are constrained, delivering a CX that can effectively retain existing customers and increase their potential lifetime value is vital.

Today, that level of differentiation is defined by data. An organization’s ability to decode and deliver against customer needs is directly proportionate to its ability to compile and interrogate data for actionable insights, whether that data is in systems and databases or within the contact center.

In recent years, banks have become experts in scrutinizing structured data, but most financial services organizations are still behind the curve when it comes to unlocking the true value of the tremendous volumes of unstructured customer data sitting in their systems. This is partially due to access limitations created by legacy systems, data silos, existing IT capabilities and even organizational structures.

But as well as access, there is the further issue of interoperability. Across all enterprises, not just within the banking sector, data exists in disparate seemingly incompatible formats, making it difficult to combine into a unified source of truth.

Structured data sources are simple to collate, combine and interrogate but unstructured data — online chat transcripts, emails, phone recordings, contact center agent notes and social media posts — is not. And yet, that’s where customer insights really reside. It’s also where expertise is needed because without it, this data type can’t be extracted and converted into a format that can be analyzed and used to drive customer-centric business decisions.