There’s no doubt we’re swimming in data these days. Just take a look at the Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphic from Scott Brinker of the Chief Marketing Technologist Blog. With the number of vendors in marketing technology nearing 2,000, why are nearly half of all organizations ineffective at measuring the business impact of their customer experience? My guess? It’s hard. We’re talking about going beyond customer satisfaction surveys. Customer experience is about determining exactly what is and what is not working between brands and customers. With nearly as many marketing dollars being used to retain current customers as are being used to obtain new ones, it’s obvious that marketing needs to focus efforts on measuring the true customer experience in order to make the best use of budgets. Determining how current customers are experiencing your brand will help to retain those customers but will also likely improve the experience of those new customers you are working hard to gain. Keeping the customer in mind at all times has proven to be successful for the bottom line as well – with a 43% improvement in performance compared with declines for organizations who are choosing to ignore the customer experience.