Known Strangers: How Unified Customer Data Drives up to 20% Higher Revenue and Reduces Churn
Companies today know more about their customers than ever before. Every click on a website, every transaction, every call to a contact center or visit to a branch leaves a trace. Yet customers often feel like complete strangers when interacting with their bank or insurer. Organizations sitting on oceans of data frequently fail to turn that knowledge into real understanding. The paradox is clear: the customer is known, yet remains unknown.
One Source of Truth
The challenge is not a lack of data but its fragmentation. Information is trapped in separate systems and departments that rarely communicate. Instead of countless isolated data points, companies must build a unified customer view – a single source of truth. Only then can they personalize experiences, respond in real time, and deliver the value customers now expect.
When Data Works Together: Lessons from Global Leaders
Coca-Cola
For years, the brand struggled with fragmented customer databases across regions. Consolidating them into a central platform enabled campaigns to launch in real time and adapt to local needs. What once took months now happens in days. Coca-Cola proves that personalization isn’t just a tactic for digital start-ups, but a strategy for global enterprises.
Booking.com
Famous for its obsession with experimentation, Booking.com often ran up to a thousand A/B tests simultaneously. Results, however, were being lost, duplicated, or underutilized. By creating a central repository of experiments, the company democratized access to insights, avoided repeated mistakes, and accelerated innovation across teams.
ZEISS
The optics and photonics leader once stored research findings in scattered folders and tools. Implementing a central Condens repository made insights easy to find, analyze, and share beyond research teams. User research became a strategic asset, helping ZEISS combine its tradition with a modern, customer-centric approach.
Miro
The fast-growing scale-up faced chaos as insights multiplied without structure. By embedding a research repository directly into its daily collaboration environment, Miro ensured findings became part of everyday decision-making and a living company culture.
The lesson?
Data alone is not enough. Only when unified and made accessible does it generate speed, relevance, and innovation. The real outcome isn’t just faster campaigns or quicker analysis, but a cultural shift – where customers stop being numbers and start being truly understood.
Banks and Insurers: A Harder but Essential Mission
For banks and insurers, the challenge is even greater than in retail or technology. Why?
- Regulation – GDPR, KYC, AML, and PSD2 demand that every personalization be explainable and auditable.
- Legacy systems – core banking platforms were built decades ago, long before real-time integration was even imagined.
- Product silos – accounts, mortgages, loans, and cards remain isolated, with no unified customer view.
This makes data unification not optional, but existential. Customers no longer compare their bank to another bank, but to Booking.com or Coca-Cola. If they receive a tailored offer there within seconds, why should they accept a slow, context-free response from their bank?
Research is clear: banks that have unified data and built single customer profiles increased cross-sell revenue by up to 20% and cut churn by 10% or more. These numbers speak for themselves.
The Central European Context
Innovation is taking shape here as well. In Central Europe, initiatives such as George by Erste (Austria-based banking group operating across the region), DoKapsy by ČSOB (a leading Czech and Slovak bank), and Air Bank’s digital ecosystem (a challenger bank known for mobile-first services) are already connecting multiple data sources to make everyday finance simpler and more personal. These examples show how the region is moving toward a more unified and human-centered banking experience—an evolution that mirrors global trends while adding a distinctive Central European perspective.
But this is still just the beginning. The potential of data, automation, and personalization is enormous—along with opportunities for cost savings, operational efficiency, and better customer service. What we see today is only the first layer. True, full-scale data unification will ultimately allow banks and insurers to deliver the kind of seamless experiences customers already expect from other parts of their digital lives.
The Future Is Opportunity
Institutions that systematically break down barriers between data and processes will win: faster decision-making, deeper loyalty, and long-term competitive advantage. The future is not about risk, but about opportunity.
Author
Kamil Schwarz, Manager, Bell & Hurry
