The most fundamental requirement in moving towards customer-centricity in digital is to be able to collate and compare data in order to improve decision-making and investments. There are a large number of moving parts and marketing groups are becoming overwhelmed with the tasks of integrating and matching the multiple sources and drawing optimal conclusions for further action.

Therefore it makes sense to use a small number of integrated digital platforms rather than many point solutions.

A true platform needs to provide a unified governance, workflow and analytics for social, supporting social customer care, social media monitoring, advertising, and research and analytics, and offers universal API access and connectors for web analytics, CRM, Marketing Automation, and content and data sources e.g. SAP Hybris, Opentext, or Salesforce.