How to tackle data-driven customer experience strategy

We're currently living in an age of information overload. As much as we want to move past it, our behaviours and interactions with digital technologies fundamentally changed throughout Covid. We’ve become accustomed to being chronically online and hyper-connected, where every site visit, every click, and every purchase generates a wealth of data.

It stands to reason, then, that these touchpoints would leave brands and marketers increasingly better informed about the needs, preferences, and behaviours of their consumers.

It’s never been more important to understand audience targeting, how to grow your brand, and how to optimise and measure the success of campaigns. You can’t have a thriving business without a high-performing digital marketing strategy. So, why are we severely lagging behind and how can we better utilise our data?

Enabling your team to turn insights into action

As marketers, it’s imperative we continually examine consumer touchpoints and marketing channels and develop a framework or approach to deliver the brand experience and ensure consistency. The core of a data-driven customer experience strategy is leveraging technology to improve not only our own understanding of the changing technological landscape but also our customer’s experience of our brand.

Once you combine the wealth of enterprise and customer data at hand, the key is turning the retroactive information into predictive data analytics that will correspond with the expected demand.

We (RMIT Online) uses a sophisticated martech stack to incorporate personalisation, increase marketing efficiencies, and adapt to consumer needs. Our Future Skills portfolio, for example, is continually evolving to quickly and decisively build, iterate, and retire courses according to what the market needs. In 2023, our new courses consisted of Deep Learning, Natural Language Processing, AI Engineering, AI for Trading, Ethical Hacking, and Digital Freelancing in partnership with global education provider, Udacity.

Enabling your team to turn these insights into action means maintaining a steady supply of data ad pulling in experience from across the business—data and analytics, communications and brand, talent and recruitment, designers and developers, UX and UI, Product, and finance—to better understand the customer journey and how you should best be interacting with them at each stage of the relationship.

Ensuring a customer-centric approach is maintained at every step

Data is the currency of the digital era we now live in, and marketing teams should be looking to invest in the right technology to enhance the customer experience. Whilst the MarTech solutions form the foundations of how we execute the customer experience, we must align these closely with a deeper understanding of our customers and how we want to engage with them as a brand.

Continuing the Future Skills portfolio example, students are truly at the center—from taking into account the various educational or professional backgrounds of our students, to what kind of online learning experience suits the course they are studying, right down to the possible future pathways from each of our courses—all of it is designed with our students' input, feedback, and expectations in mind.

However, even the best product or course can only go so far if the service that comes with it is lacking. CRM tools provide a centralised view of what interactions a customer has had with us, what platforms they’re engaging on, and where they are on their journey. All of this data, once properly understood, helps us guide them on their journey towards a better experience.

Building trust in the age of privacy concerns

2023 was a year that saw a number of high-impact data breaches. Less than a full month into 2024, we’ve already seen Binge, Dan Murphy’s, The Iconic, Inspiring Vacations, and Guzman y Gomez affected by 'credential stuffing'—a process where hackers gain unauthorised access to customer accounts.

All eyes are trained on privacy, security, and data. Consumers are increasingly aware of the types of data they’re providing, and with whom. Regulators and Governments are conscious of privacy requirements. Businesses are similarly aware of their responsibility to keep consumer data safe and the dual opportunity to improve their customer engagement strategies. In this landscape, no person, brand, or organisation is immune.

If you want to gain the benefits associated with customer data, you must be able to collect said data from your customers. Therefore, tackling a data-driven customer experience strategy means building—and crucially, maintaining—trust with your customers.

Anshu Arora is the Customer Success and Growth director for RMIT Online.