When times are tight, exploiting the customer data at your fingertips can help your organisation do business more productively and efficiently, writes Prakash Durgani, Vice President of APAC & Japan, Twilio Segment.

Every day businesses gain more data about their interactions with customers, yet many continue to struggle to make use of it for personalisation and analytics.

Data may be stored in multiple locations and in different formats, making it difficult to combine to achieve a single view of each customer. As a result, customer experiences suffer and relationships erode.

Netflix knows what I want.

It is becoming harder to imagine a time when people actually had to watch whatever was scheduled for them. Thanks to the internet, TV – like many other things - has become a personalised experience. The catch? Well, as is the case with every instance of personalisation, it is all about The Trade: I give you my data, you give me an experience tailored to me.

A couple of weeks ago Avaya Australia announced that it had been selected for a five-year contract by the Australian Department of Defence (ADoD) as the contact centre technology provider. What follows is the second part of our discussion with Peter Chidiac, Avaya’s Managing Director of Australia and New Zealand. Peter provided some candid input on automation, analytics, AI and machine learning and how the combination of these tools will continue to shape Customer Experience and the future of the contact centre.

Personalisation, which used to be simply about adding someone’s first name to an email, has been undergoing a rapid evolution over the past few years. Thanks to advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), big data, analytics, machine learning and mobile devices, the way in which brands reach and communicate with their audiences has changed dramatically. We are now in an era of hyperpersonalisation, a time in which customer experience (CX) is being driven by highly curated experiences for increasingly demanding customers with growing expectations.

With technology rapidly advancing, it's never been more important for companies to meet evolving customer expectations. But companies need to start by understanding their customers and the total Customer Experience (CX) before introducing new technologies. An emerging trend is that the gap between CX leaders and laggards is widening – and will continue to widen – as the companies with a clear CX execution strategy enjoy greater growth than those who haven't yet set a clear path forward. In this article, we’ll take a look at 3 key areas that differentiate Leaders from Laggards. 

Retail is changing. On top of the rising popularity of online shopping there is also a tectonic demographic shift taking place. As Baby Boomers retire and the remaining Generation Xers enter their 40s, Millennials are beginning to enter the mid-stage of their career. As a result, their buying power is increasing and they are changing the retail game.

Retail is currently in a state of upheaval both globally and here in Australia. Facing weakening growth, changing customer expectations and increasing competition online brick-and-mortar retailers must explore customer experience (CX) strategies that will allow them to thrive, and, in some cases, survive.

As marketers love to point out, we are living in "The Age of the Customer", a time when Customer Experience (CX) has risen to the forefront of brands' survival in the digital world.

In the last few years, the rise of mobile, technology savvy customers with increasingly high expectations has changed the business landscape significantly. As well as having access to more information, today's customers are vocal and unafraid to use social media to advocate or vilify brands.

We've all experienced it. You research a product online and for the next few weeks, you are stalked mercilessly by ads. It's a kind of personalised advertising known as "retargeting" and it can result in ads that continue to follow you long after you have made your purchase.