How Integrated Are Your Customer Experiences?

When I worked in banking I learned a lot about the tricks banks use to coordinate the sale of their products to customers across the bank's various contact points with said customer. The part I worked on was to address the ability of the bank to integrate IT systems to promote products to you via a variety of outlets: printed inserts, prompts to tellers, ATM, the bank's web site, etc. The holy grail was a system in which promotions were not sprayed at you shotgun style, but rather if you said "no" to the ATM prompt for a credit card, the teller would know not to bug you about it when you walked in the branch. Banks also want to individualize their promotions to your lifestyle, net worth, etc., again via a coordinated effort across the bank's various contact points with you. Wells Fargo, for example, is getting really good at this.

Peter Merholz has some more on this in his HBR blog post entitled
How Integrated Are Your Customer Experiences?. Of particular interest to me is the discussion around "Channel-specific organizational silos rarely have incentives to coordinate their activities."