The human element – even for online businesses – always shapes the final judgment on customer retention and acquisition.

This is the exact reason why becoming a customer-driven organization is so important, even in the age of data-driven marketing. In most cases a human interaction will determine whether customers remain loyal or churn. This is part of the customer experience, just as much as delivering the right content to individuals to drive the desired behavior. While data-driven marketing can handle most customer experience, for offline businesses and even online businesses, the human interaction is critical to handling the cases where things don't quite go as well as you hoped.

The morale of this story is: make sure that your employees are your strongest, most amazing asset because the most sophisticated technology or data-driven marketing can’t replace what your employees can deliver – caring, thoughtful, on-the-spot customer happiness.

Period. Full stop.

here is so much talk about who owns the customer experience and why CMO's are reluctant to own the entire experience. In this article the letter describes the interaction with Terry from the call-center. Now this interaction is as much part of the brand as an advertisement driving a customer to a website or in-store. This experience defines the brand, yet the overall person in charge of this is not the CMO, it is more than likely an callcenter manager that reports up through an operations division.

This is where the customer-driven organization has to be a culture, not an individual. It doesn't matter what the position title is, there is no one person that can be the customer advocate throughout large organizations. The customer advocate has to be all employees, period. There could be a person leading the charge, but until an organization has changed its culture to be truly customer-centric, data-driven marketing and great advertisement will never drive the most ROI possible because the organization is not focusing on the customer experience as a whole.

For data-driven marketing to succeed doesn't need a customer-centric organization, there is a lot of value and areas to increase revenue. My belief is all organizations should be customer-centric, this enhances all aspects of the business, not just the data-driven marketing side.