How 5 trendsetters are transforming the art of data-driven customer experiences

A staggering number of businesses are realizing the positive impact AI can have on marketing, personalization, and customer experience. But under the hood, AI efforts are only as good as the data powering them. 

Many companies have found, however, that forging data into AI-ready shape isn't straightforward, as they discover that the customer data they have is often incomplete, inconsistent, and siloed across different business functions.

Building an effective data-driven personalization strategy requires leadership that inspires action and collaboration across a wide range of teams, including marketing, sales, customer success, product, and data engineering.

These five leaders have that inspiration ability. Plus, they've got the ability to combine business savvy with technical acumen to drive meaningful, cutting-edge results. They also just so happen to all be using Twilio's customer engagement platform to give each individual customer a personalized experience at exactly the right time.

Read on to find out how these trendsetters are transforming the art of data-driven customer experience.

Alexandra Dimitriu

Alexandra Dimitriu, a senior systems manager at MongoDB, said that her job sits at the crossroads of technology and business: Building technical strategies to boost marketing and sales impact. 

Alexandra said that her experience has taught her a crucial lesson about customer engagement: "It is often more complex than it initially appears." Details and implementation make an enormous difference and the best solution is not always the most advanced or complex. Focus on the customer and the most effective way of addressing their needs — the solution might be simpler than you think.

She has been exploring the potential for AI in marketing and customer engagement, collaborating with various companies to use AI for content creation, pattern recognition, and recommendation systems. She's an avid user of ChatGPT and continues to discover new integration opportunities each day.

The future of data-driven marketing and customer experience will be increasingly personalized, Alexandra said — empowering even non-technical users to drive value from data and providing benefits to marketers and customers alike. "But we're at a pivotal point," she said, "where trust hangs in the balance." It's crucial over the next few years for marketers to make decisions that maintain users' trust — considering factors "beyond mere profit."

Brad Greene

The senior director of marketing technology at Camping World, Brad Greene oversees the company's martech stack. He describes his typical day-to-day work as "solving puzzles" — using either existing tech that's already in the company's tech stack or else identifying new solutions to create positive experiences for customers.

Camping World is currently using AI to determine the optimal times for sending messages to customers, which messaging will resonate, and which products they'll be most interested in. Brad believes that AI is the future of digital marketing — enabling marketers to make full use of all the data they've been collecting and automating an increasing number of decisions in real-time.

But you don't have to do it all at once. Brad recommends starting your data-driven journey with a single use case and an achievable goal.

The biggest lesson he's learned about customer engagement? Camping World's customers don't mind hearing from the company. "Our customers want to hear from us, and hear from us often," he said. "Frequency doesn't matter as much, as long as the communication is relevant."

Michaela Kron-Hags

As marketing campaign director at language education platform Duolingo, Michaela Kron-Hags leads global brand marketing campaigns tied to key moments throughout the year, from holidays like Halloween to pop culture moments like the Barbie movie. 

She is a big proponent of creating truly authentic customer connections, saying her biggest lesson learned is the importance of "taking the time to watch, listen, and learn about our customers' and audiences' interests and tailor our campaigns to authentically connect. Listening to our customers on social has led to some of our most successful efforts."

Duolingo was an early adopter of AI, using large language models to personalize language lessons and accelerate content creation. Within marketing, Michaela's team is experimenting with new ways to leverage generative AI for initial research on new audiences and often uses ChatGPT prompts in early brainstorming sessions. She notes the value of combining AI automation with skills that are innately human: "Working with AI-driven processes will enable marketers to focus their efforts on uniquely human talents, including strategy and storytelling. For us, the best ideas still come from the creative humans on our team!"

Jordan Dietch

Jordan Dietch is the VP of product, data & analytics at CraftJack, leading a team of product managers, data analysts, and data engineers who work with engineering, design, marketing, and sales. Their goal is to deliver the highest possible value products and features for their customers, who are home service professionals looking for home improvement projects.

Jordan said he's learned that, in many cases, there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution that will work for every single customer. The company's customers come in "all shapes and sizes," he said. "Personalization is expected. It's our role to deliver personalized experiences to engage with all our different customers."

CraftJack is exploring how AI fits into its service offerings and is providing plenty of time for Jordan's team to experiment and challenge the status quo, using the OpenAI API as well as internal data. Jordan fully expects that software development will accelerate in the future as engineers work alongside AI to write code faster, solving marketing and CX problems more quickly. Businesses unwilling to adapt to this high-speed, AI-powered pace will likely fall behind as customers begin to expect faster and faster changes, Jordan predicts.

His advice? Invest in a solid customer data foundation. If you skip this essential step, it will lead to scalability problems when building out a customer engagement strategy. By contrast, a well-built customer data platform offers "near-infinite possibilities for companies to engage with their customers."

Corey Egan 

Corey Egan is the director of CRM at Orchard, overseeing a team that manages the end-to-end automation of outbound communications across the entire customer journey. That translates into nurturing leads, bringing them back into the sales funnel, and helping improve conversion rates across the funnel. Day to day, he said that means a lot of brainstorming on new ways to approach customer experiences, managing and optimizing campaigns, developing and maintaining customer data, and managing a CRM.

Orchard, as a real estate company, has an extremely long consideration cycle. That means the company takes a lot of care to build up positive customer interactions and a consistent, holistic customer experience over a long period of time, which in turn requires careful coordination among marketing, product, engineering, and sales teams.

Corey recommends that leaders looking to implement data-driven customer engagement strategies invest resources early into building a cross-functional team focused on internal customer data. "Many companies silo these efforts and then wonder why customer experience is lacking," Corey said. Instead, ensure that this team includes marketing, product, data engineering, and sales/CX leaders — and that one of its mandates is to define an internal framework for first-party data to ensure that the organization has consistent, reliable access to customer data. "When everyone is looking at customer experience through the same lens, it rapidly improves efficiency and collaboration," Corey said.

Learn how to harness the power of your customer data with AI here.

This post was created by Twilio with Insider Studios.