Customer data that people can actually use.
A company can have plenty of customer data and still make its customers repeat themselves. Marketing knows which campaign they answered. Sales knows what was promised. Service knows what went wrong. The customer has to connect the story.
For 2020, I would put that broken connection near the top of the leadership agenda. The opportunity is to make existing information useful at the moment someone needs to act on it.
A shared record needs shared decisions
Salesforce announced Customer 360 Truth in November 2019, bringing data and identity services into its customer platform. That is a useful direction. It also puts an old organisational problem in clearer view: what does the business agree a customer record means?
Two systems may contain the same email address but disagree about the account, the relationship or the person's preferences. Connecting those systems without deciding which values to trust simply moves the disagreement faster.
Assign ownership for identity matching, important fields and corrections. Give frontline teams a practical way to report mistakes. Data quality improves when someone can resolve an issue, rather than merely add it to a report.
Connect one handover first
Take a qualified marketing enquiry. What information should reach the salesperson? What should happen if the person is already a customer with an unresolved service case? Who records the outcome so marketing can learn from it?
Map that small sequence before designing a company-wide data programme. Define the fields, the timing and the person responsible when the transfer fails. Then test it with real examples, including duplicates and missing information.
Measure the customer consequence
A successful integration can still leave the customer waiting. Alongside technical delivery, measure the time to a useful response, the number of repeated questions and whether the receiving team can complete its work.
The 2019 argument about leadership still applies. Someone must make decisions across departmental boundaries and protect time to fix the awkward details. A shared customer view becomes valuable when it changes what the business does next.
My priority for 2020 would be one connected experience that works reliably. Use the evidence from that experience to decide where to go next.
Context: Salesforce's November 2019 Customer 360 Truth announcement.
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Annual series edition: 5 January. This edition was prepared or revised on 8 September 2026.
