If there is one thing that touches every aspect of your organization, from sales and marketing to distribution, HR and accounting, it is information — the data you collect, analyze and transform to make better business decisions. This can be anything: your financial reports, sales trends, competitor analysis, and of course, your customer information. Unfortunately, customer information isn’t top-of-mind for most organizations, and even when it is, it’s generally viewed only through a risk and compliance lens — e.g., meeting privacy regulations and protecting against data breaches.

But this information matters. And it has the potential to be so much more. Consider these examples:

• Your sales team on the phone with a potential lead, using the data you’ve collected on them to provide a solution specifically tailored to their business challenges.
• A customer service representative in a webchat with a disgruntled customer, using the data aggregated from previous touchpoints to personalize a response that reassures the customer that your organization has been listening to their complaints.
• Video kiosks across your retail outlets, using a centralized team to provide quality customer service to shoppers, no matter where they're located.

Your information is a key component of any successful customer experience strategy. But how can you best make use of it?

For starters, it pays to take down the barriers that are preventing information from getting to where it needs to go in your organization. Often, information is dispensed on a need-to-know basis, especially when it comes to customer data. This is understandable, considering the privacy and compliance concerns involved, but this should not stop your organization from taking steps to ensure that at any potential touchpoint, employees have all relevant customer information with which to provide the highest quality customer experience.

These barriers can affect the customer experience, even when they’re not in customer-facing areas of the organization. Inefficient workflows cost you time and productivity, but often also have a ripple effect that eventually reaches the customer. The more time that workers spend attempting to finish an inefficient process, the less time they have to spend on their day-to-day work, follow up on customer complaints, or proactively engage with customers. After all, it’s difficult for your high performers to go the extra mile for customers when they’re busy dealing with inefficient processes and workflows.