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Despite some companies' successes in analyzing customer data, a new Forrester report reveals that more data means more challenges for many organizations. In the report "Trends in Cross-Channel Campaign Management," by Forrester analyst Suresh Vittal, marketers reveal that marketing and communicating across channels is not easy. Here are the biggest challenges they expect to face over the next two years:

• Communication coordination is an obstacle to success. Forty-nine percent of respondents selected coordination of communications across channels and 48 percent indicated personalizing messages based on consumer behavior across channels (as their top two challenges. Forty-two percent of respondents also find integrating online and offline channels challenging. Channel complexities make it difficult for current applications to operate on a program rather than channel level, which in turn limits how marketers scale their marketing programs.

• It's not easy to identify meaningful metrics. Forty-three percent of marketers find measuring results across multiple channels challenging.

• Customer retention poses a big challenge. An uncertain economic climate means that marketers are focused on retaining their current customers rather than recruiting new ones. Thirty-seven percent of survey respondents said that retention is a big problem in their organizations. They also said that they fail to agree on a common definition of attrition, lack the modeling capabilities to consistently predict churn, and when they do predict churn, they do little to save the customer.

Organizations are in desperate need of multichannel strategies. I plan to Twitter tomorrow and Friday throughout Forrester's Marketing Forum 2010 to offer some answers and advice about new approaches to thriving in this ever-changing, and complex digital environment in which we live. Please follow my Tweets at http://twitter.com/miladantonio