More than ever, having a successful customer experience depends on smooth collaboration and alignment across an entire organization. That's a key finding of The Leader’s Guide to CX Trends in 2025 , a survey from Nextiva.
Customers feel the difference. They know whether an organization is acting as one. When it doesn’t, they have to repeat information, start from scratch, or deal with a representative who knows nothing about them.
EDHEC, the international business school, wrote about this in June. Customer Experience Management (CXM) “is a continuous, adaptive process that requires deep customer data insights, agile systems and a commitment to cross-functional collaboration,” the school said.
In hopes of fostering greater collaboration, businesses are investing in new platforms. Teams are exploring which are the best collaboration tools for enterprises or SMBs. But, they often end up confused and unsure what to look for.
This makes sense. Technologies are developing more quickly than ever, and AI is opening up new worlds of possibilities. Since I get these kinds of questions from executives frequently, I’ve learned how to help them see the most crucial things to look for.
The silos problem remains unsolved
For years, businesses have known that, in order to collaborate successfully, people across different departments and functions need access to the same information. But the problem has not been solved – in fact, many report that it’s gotten worse.
In our survey, 95% of CX leaders told us their employer uses multiple tools for CX, and 86% of them reported problems with data silos. While some hoped AI tools would solve the problem, many told us it hasn’t.
“When asked about the challenges they’d faced in implementing AI, CX leaders put data management at the top of their list,” the study found. “Multiple tools often means siloed data, which can make it difficult to gain a holistic customer view. It also makes it very difficult to get the real-time insights necessary to identify the most impactful points in the customer journey. These insights are crucial for effectively using AI and automation to support key interactions.”
We’re not the only ones finding that data silos continue to be a big problem. In a McKinsey survey, 80% of organizations reported having divisions that “operate in silos, each with its own data management requirements, practices, source systems, and consumption behaviors. For example, a sales team may maintain client data in a customer relationship management (CRM) system, while a marketing team may use a client data platform (CDP) to create customer profiles and inform ad campaigns. Silos can lead to inconsistencies and errors, increasing the difficulty of making decisions related to business, data, and technology.”
These issues also lead employees to waste time searching for the same information, which lowers productivity.
The solution includes everyone
Technologies can solve this. The key is to operate with a single source of truth , in which everyone uses the same system to track customer information. An AI-powered unified customer experience management (UCXM ) platform can pull together all the information about every customer, across every touchpoint.
But for it to work, it must pull in the entire organization. Many businesses have long thought of only certain functions as being part of the customer experience – generally, those that are officially customer-facing. But, it’s a new era now.
In our survey, we invited leaders to think about how any and all functions impact CX. The result: 73% of respondents named traditionally “back office” teams as having an important role. These include operations, IT, legal, finance, HR, and more. Only when they operate together will the experience be frictionless. (This can be done without sacrificing privacy or security.)
Agentic AI demands it
It isn’t just high time to end data silos and improve collaboration; it’s a necessity for any business looking to take advantage of what AI has to offer.
When generative AI took off, many businesses rushed to adopt it. Now, something even bigger has come along: agentic AI. “Supe r-agents ” may soon be able to handle huge sums of information and process tasks quickly.
Meanwhile, even as agentic AI takes off, Fast Company says that “interpretive AI will be the real revolution.” It “lets computers understand messy, complex, and unstructured information and interpret it in predictable, defined ways,” John Lester, a partner with management consultancy Oliver Wyman, wrote.
All of these AI uses have something basic in common: they’re only as powerful as the information they can access. So, inside an organization, teams may wish to use these tools to suggest new products and services; handle routine work; devise marketing plans; or draft legal statements. But, the results will only be useful if all teams are contributing their latest information in the first place. After all, a marketing plan for a product in development is only useful when the tool knows the design’s latest features. A marketing plan is only useful when the tool knows the latest details on what customers are looking for.
This can happen. When organizations operate every day with the same platform and update it in real-time, they achieve unprecedented levels of cooperation – and skyrocket to greater success.
About the author: Yaniv Masjedi joined Nextiva in 2008 and currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer. He manages Nextiva’s marketing and branding efforts by working to create strategies that drive awareness, strengthen the Nextiva brand, and share the story of the company’s unique customer-centric culture, known as “Amazing Service”. He also initiates and manages programs related to brand management, demand generation, and advertising. Yaniv studied Political Science and History at UCLA.
Edited by
Erik Linask
