Customer 360

CHAPTER 11What Does “Real Time” Really Mean?

Not long ago, a global study of customer experience professionals uncovered a paradox. Respondents regularly ranked “Engaging with customers in real time” as one of their most important strategic priorities … and also, poignantly, as one of their greatest challenges. In previous years, real-time engagement was the number one challenge.

What does this say about overworked Customer 360 technologists?

We think there is a lot of confusion about exactly what real-time customer engagement means. Even a casual web search reveals a potpourri of inconsistent definitions. One seemingly reliable source says it’s “systematically responding to your customer,” while another—no less authoritative—defines it as “focusing on … customer feedback.” Certainly, both are important. But are they enough?

Newer technologies, including CDPs and data warehouses, are putting more real-time data into the hands of practitioners, who can use it to improve their service, chatbots, product recommendations, campaigns, analytics, and so on. While it’s important to capture and process data rapidly, it’s not always necessary to act on it right away. Real time does not have to mean right now—and often, an immediate response is exactly the wrong thing to do for your Customer 360.

We’re not denying that faster is usually better than slower. But there is always a foundational trade-off between the overhead (storage, compute, configuration, skills) required for instant data ...