How taking back control of your data can make all the difference in elevating the human experience—and the research to support it.
It’s no secret that organizations everywhere are vying to win the hearts and minds of customers through elevated, personalized experiences. But we wanted to know how a bit more about how these brands are handling the now-overwhelming amounts of data they’ve been longing for. We spoke with Angel Vaccaro, Hux by Deloitte Digital Practice Leader, and John Healy, Managing Director, to get the lowdown on how smart organizations are winning on customer experience and some recent findings from a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Deloitte, that tells a not-so-surprising story.

So, let’s get right to the point. What’s the big secret to winning on customer experience?

There’s virtually no way for a brand to create personalized or elevated human experiences if they don’t have access to, control over, or visibility into their data. We see taking back control of your data as step number one in trying to compete on an experience level. 

What about all the latest technology that claims to harness this data for you?

A lot of brands buy all these shiny tools and martech platforms and commerce platforms, but without the right data, a tool is just a tool. Once you enable these tools with data and insights about your customers, then you can orchestrate more human experiences.

So, let’s talk about how that connection works.

It’s about bringing all of your data together—knowing where it is, having control over it, and removing silos—so you can really understand your customers in a deeper way. And then using that data very intentionally to create personalized experiences at scale.

A lot of brands still have data stored externally to their organization, maybe outsourced with different agencies, and for them to get it is complicated or expensive. And even internal to larger enterprises, data can still be very siloed by channel, whether it’s call center, retail, digital, etc...

The research talks a lot about bringing data in house.

When we say in house, it’s about bringing the data back under control of the brand, no longer “renting” your own data from another party. Regardless of where it sits, the goal is that you gain visibility, control, and ownership.

A brand might have a great view of their call center or digital data, for example, but if it’s not integrated with the retail data and all the other aspects of the experience, then it’s not a full picture of the customer. If you’re not bringing in the experience data or the sentiment data, you might be marketing to or triggering certain messages to that customer that might be completely irrelevant because you’re only looking at part of the story.

So, is the idea to get a fuller picture of every interaction?

It is not just individual interactions but knowing the ones that matter the most. Understand the ones that touch life events, the ones that have the potential to drive the most impact and create the most value for your customers. 

Can customer data management also help marketers prove ROI?

Today, more often than not, marketers are being held accountable for the growth story. And in order to do this, they must create an elevated and differentiated customer experience. When they realize that the data they need isn’t there, what we’re seeing—and what the research supports—is that brands have to take control of their data. They have to own it. And then they can layer on the right analytics to ultimately deliver on personalized human experiences, across all interaction channels.

To learn more about what it takes to compete and win on customer experience, check out the research.