6 Thought Leaders Share Insights for Enhancing the Customer Experience Through The Responsible Use of Data

Consumers are demanding and expecting more of brands with each passing moment. And marketers know actionable and relevant data is the key to meeting those expectations and delivering an amazing customer experience.

However, with data spread across multiple platforms, internal systems and scattered across online and offline sources, many marketers are looking for guidance. And not to mention the internal challenges in aligning teams and resources, coupled with the heightened climate around data privacy.

So, what’s a marketer to do?

We recently asked six data-driven thought leaders in the customer experience and digital marketing realm to share their insights on how marketers can leverage data responsibly and associated technologies in the right way to create better experiences.

Among the themes that surfaced:

• Using data responsibly to personalize
• Developing a robust data strategy
• Asking the right questions of your data
• Embracing edge data / IoT
• Owning your data in the face of the changing data privacy landscape

Meet Our Thought Leaders

1. Tamara McCleary, CEO – Thulium.co Uncover Actionable Insights By Asking Your Data the Right Questions Ask the right questions of the data! It’s simple, it IS the one thing, and yet it’s missed. Too many marketers expect the data to magically reveal insights, and guess what? Data doesn’t work that way.

   Identifying actionable sources of customer insights ARE the reasons marketers would want to allocate a portion of their spend on the right marketing technology, a martech consultant to make sure the right marketing technology is deployed, and that all the “packages” are fully integrated to optimize spend whilst offering actionable insights that will ultimately drive growth. Unfortunately these highly salivated-for “actionable insights” are often left undelivered or there’s a malignant disconnect between insights and execution.

2. Shep Hyken, Chief Amazement Officer – Shepard Presentations LLC Give Your Customers What They Crave: Personalization Customers like a personalized experience. They like getting appropriate and relevant content, and at the right time. The way a marketer can deliver that experience is by using the customer’s data.

   Some of that is based on the customer’s buying and browsing history. Some is based on information the customer provides. When customers share information with you and let you into their lives, they are, in effect, giving you permission to do so. The key is to not abuse the privilege of having that data. The moment you cross that line, you risk the customer deleting that email (or whatever channel you are using to market to the customer), or worse, deleting you permanently.

3. Sameer Khan, Director of Global Analytics, Marketing Technology & Operations – Alert Logic Develop a Robust & Responsible Data Strategy Companies today need a robust data strategy that encompasses data storage, processing, agility, security and user details. Every major step of data management must have clearly defined objectives and ownership.

   Internal or external data sharing must have pre-defined SLAs and alerts needs to be in place for SLA breaches followed by quick remediation and communication. Companies must consider building data lakes besides the data warehouse to give users and technology the flexibility to manage data. Data security and privacy will continue to be one of the biggest challenges. Customers are becoming smarter and are more active in voicing their privacy and security concerns. Companies need to get their act together and “drink data” responsibly.

4. Ronald Van Loon, Director – Adversitement Embrace IoT as a Way to Inform, Deploy & Improve the Customer Experience 2018 is shaping up to be an influential year for IoT technologies, particularly in how businesses handle the customer experience.

   Industries that are really demonstrating behavioral transformation due to IoT’s impact are Smart Home technology, Connected Cars, Smart City Applications, and Industrial IoT. Sensors are providing real business value for these industries, and enabling them to leverage data generated in real-time to accelerate innovation. In the coming few years, IoT will be further transformed by Deep Learning, which has a significant amount of untapped potential for analyzation of large quantities of IoT data, transforming it into relevant actions and improving A.I. algorithm accuracy by 98-99%. Through IoT, informing and deploying actionable customer experience solutions is more attainable than ever.

5. Chris Penn, Founder – Brain + Trust Insight Strive to Own Your Own Data The most important thing that marketers should being doing is addressing the issue of customer data being scattered and disconnected, particularly with GDPR coming along is that marketers have got to own their data.

   If your data is in a bunch of different systems, especially if they are third-party systems, there is absolutely no guarantee that you will continue to have access to that data. GDPR has the right to be forgotten, the right to transfer data between systems, which are major issues for MarTech companies because they have to be able to hand the customer the data in a common, machinereadable format so that they can port it to somebody else.

6. 	Bob Egan, President and Founder – The Sepharim Group Don’t Ignore the Power of IoT If companies across sectors want to truly transform the customer experience, then they can’t ignore IoT. In 2018, I already see IoT having a great impact and expect that it will only continue to grow.
   For example, for enterprises in the manufacturing sector some companies are already seeing high business impact because they are reducing build order cycles by more than 35%. Healthcare is another high growth area. With IoT combined with data analytics and AI, hospital and wellness facilities are able to reduce patient in-clinic time and cost, while also accelerating patient recovering times.

Connect the Data Dots

Data can – and should – be your most valuable marketing asset and the foundation of your customer experience approach if uses the right way. We hope this new eBook can be a helpful guide to help you do just that.