The irony of this period of Big Data is that many organizations are becoming even more disconnected from their customers.
Technology creates both insights and blindness when it comes to understanding customers. Much of Big Data is about customer behavior: what they bought, how they bought, what devices they used, how many pages they looked at, etc. In some ways, organizations have never known more about their customers.
In other ways, they have never known less. The big thing missing in Big Data is empathy. There’s lots of data on customers, but real human, living customers are not to be found in data. The irony is that to create Big Data the customer needs to be interacting with technology instead of with an employee. In many organizations, less and less employees have direct interaction with customers.
