I went to see a concert last night that epitomizes the state of customer insights in most companies today. It was a benefit for Creative Music Studio and brought together incredible artists such as Billy Martin, Cyro Baptista, Marc Ribot, and Ingrid Sertso. While I was happy to contribute to Creative Music Studio’s cause, the music itself was dissonant, discordant, and downright discombobulating. At one point, there were 15 musical virtuosos on stage together all playing brilliant but completely divergent parts. Unfortunately, a similar lack of orchestration plagues the customer analytics practice in most businesses today, resulting in inharmonious customer experiences.

In the world of customer analytics, soaring solos only get you so far. Delivering harmonious customer experiences across the customer life cycle requires careful collaboration across different business functions — from marketing to customer care to operations to product — yet, since each line of business has its own genre of incentives and KPIs, it’s virtually impossible to get them to play off the same sheet music.

Clearly, a new paradigm is needed. The next best experience (NBX for short) is the holy grail that CI pros should strive toward in order to deliver the right experience to the right customer at the right time. Like its “next best trilogy” forebears (next best product, next best offer, and next best action), NBX delivers a recommendation based on signals from customer data. Unlike them, however, it analyzes signals across the customer journey, independent of business domain. The recommendation can therefore manifest in many types of customer experiences: from customer service to customer engagement to operations or sales and marketing.

Of course, mastering NBX is no easy task. Technically speaking, it is analytically complex. From an organizational perspective, it requires a significant mind shift — from silos (John) to collaboration (The Beatles) and from short-term success (“All About That Bass”) to long-term success (“Abbey Road”). The good news is that you probably already have many of the right instruments in place. My new report, “Come Together (Right Now) To Deliver The Next Best Experience,” explains what the next best experience is, how to tune it analytically, and how to conduct it organizationally, as well. It is the new vision report of Forrester’s customer analytics playbook, as it describes the ideal end state of your customer analytics practice.

Please check out the new report here and let me know how it resonates. As always, I’m happy to discuss this research with you during an inquiry call. NBX can be daunting, but with the right guidance, you will rock it!

And . . . if you love music like I do, please tune in to this report and see if you can key into all the music references.