A few years back, I was attending an executive presentation of project findings and recommendations for an outdoor products manufacturing company. The project remit was defining the future state digital architecture and a high-level plan to support the organization’s transformation of the customer experience. Our engagement lead had vetted the findings and recommendations with the client’s core team. The core team was excited about the level of detail, the plan’s comprehensiveness, and the consistent architecture across multiple tools that would enable an outstanding customer experience.

When you consider how customers interact with organizations these days, it quickly becomes apparent that much of that interaction is through digital channels. “CX” suggests a customer experience via laptops or mobile devices, and that digital experience is driven entirely by data. The question is, how do we make it the most relevant and seamless experience possible, given the needs and objectives of the user, and what data can we leverage to do so? In addition to voice of the customer feedback through surveys and social media monitoring (which provide high-level themes), three principal ways of leveraging data can be used in order to create an excellent customer experience:

Personalization comes in multiple shapes and forms, many of which businesses can put to effective use. But they shouldn't make the mistake of launching all of them at once. An incremental approach works well here. And a good place to start is product hierarchies.