The top response wasn’t tools, channels, or even customer expectations. It was process and data issues.

While not surprising, it is telling. Despite continued investment in platforms and technologies, many organizations are still working through foundational challenges in how data is structured, managed, and used across customer communications.

This insight aligns with what we’ve been hearing across recent cXm Professionals educational sessions, and what I continue to see in communication platform modernization engagements, where several consistent patterns have emerged.

First, data is often prepared for a specific communication or channel, limiting reuse. Second, communication data is fragmented across systems supporting different lifecycle stages. And third, teams still spend significant time preparing and reconciling data before automated workflows can produce communications.

As organizations expand digital channels, these challenges become more visible. The same communication is expected to exist consistently across formats, touchpoints, and moments in the customer journey, placing greater pressure on how data is structured and managed upstream.

But what’s beginning to shift is what we consider “data” in the first place.

For years, most organizations have focused on variable and metadata, the structured fields used for composition and indexing. Increasingly, organizations are expanding the types of data they generate and retain for future use cases.