In friendship, listening is about hearing and remembering what is said. In business, remembering is about data.

In friendship, we all have one or two scatterbrained friends who can never seem to remember anything. Almost every business is more scatterbrained than their employees and customers wish they were!

Here are six surprising statistics about listening to customers:

We have not yet learned how to plan to listen across channels.

• Only 11% of CMO’s have omni-channel strategies. (Source: The CMO Club and Rakuten Marketing, “The CMO Solution Guide: Demystifying Omnichannel Marketing to Create a Winning Strategy for CMO’s,” 2015.)

Our employees have found that problems with listening across channels are keeping them from meeting goals.

• 40% of sales and marketing teams say that multiple data sources are hurting results. (Source: SmartFocus, “Marketing Pain Points and How to Overcome Them,” 2015. Harvard Business Review, “The New Science of Sales Performance,” 2014.)
• Poor integration or master data management (MDM) is decreasing the ROI of CRM projects by 25%. (Source: Gartner, “MDM is Critical to CRM Optimization,” 2014.)
• CRM practitioners site a lack of integration as the leading cause of CRM failure. (Source: C5 Insight, “CPR for CRM Study,” 2014.)

And not only are these problems hurting customer relationships, they are also hurting employee engagement.

• The satisfaction of customer-facing employees drops by 14.5% when they have to use more than 2 systems to get their jobs done. (Source: C5 Insight, “CPR for CRM Study,” 2014.)
• The average worker has to use 20-30 applications per week to get their jobs done. (Source: ZDNet, “The digital workplace 2014: Plight and promise of today’s employees,” 2014.)

Want to learn more? Click here to download the full infographic on omni-channel listening.