As soon as the marketing world went digital, it was inevitable that the expression ‘customer experience’ would spawn its digital equivalent.

Today digital experience is big business, with Fortune Business Insights estimating its value to be US$5.01 billion ($7.72 billion) this year, growing to US$12.30 billion ($18.96 billion) by 2032. That includes everything that develops, manages, and refines personalised content for customer experiences, from digital channels and campaign tools to the systems that plan and manage them.

The definition of digital experience has evolved as new capabilities have come to market, with the term also covering several other activities such as campaign management and marketing automation.

As marketers have come to care more about reaching prospects and customers with more tailored offers, digital experience has also come to incorporate greater aspects of personalisation, leading it to be tied more closely to first party data management platforms.

The result is a somewhat amorphous concept that defies definition and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Time to get personal

The financial services company Challenger has been on a mission to fast-track maturity of its digital platforms and lift its digital experience, including migration to a cloud-based iteration of its Sitecore-based web presence to streamlined processes and improve opportunities for personalisation. The company has also deployed Salesforce Marketing Cloud to further enhance its personalisation efforts.

“From a marketing perspective I'm wanting to reduce cost to serve and increase efficiency,” said general manager for marketing Carly O’Keefe.

“The main thing customers want is content that's relevant for them at the right time and right place, that they can easily source, and where there's less friction in the journey

“With our martech stack now we're able to automate journeys and optimise while we're in market. What we want, and we’re not there yet, is hyper-personalisation, and we want it to be really easy. What I'm wanting is to come up with personalised journeys based on what someone's done, rather than me needing to automate all the triggers into a workflow.”

This transformation has also seen Challenger invest in new communication capabilities to more effectively reach customers across different media depending on their noted preferences.

“My direction to the team is I want something that will give us results at scale,” O’Keefe said.

“I don't want a little lift – I want to build flagship campaigns that are optimised experiences.”

Personal finance

Increased competition in financial services and the desire among customers for a more tailored experience has meant personalised digital experience is a critical goal for many of that industry’s marketers today.

When Chris Maccan joined the Australian financial services firm NOW Finance five years ago the company’s direct-to-consumer channels were still developing, with minimal brand strategy and structure and limited development of its customer value proposition.

But given the company’s goal of being the most liked lending brand, that has meant ensuring that the way it engages with new and existing customers meets that aspiration. And that has meant investing in marketing automation and campaign capabilities that are up to the task.

“Our martech stack was very fragmented, which meant we couldn't stitch together a coherent customer journey,” Maccan said.

“We had no customer-centric architecture, our digital experience was clunky, we didn't have attribution through our different channels and touchpoints.”

The company’s initial choice for a marketing automation platform was Braze, with HubSpot acting as the sales and service hub. Maccan soon found it made more sense to consolidate to a single platform, with HubSpot chosen to provide the full end-to-end customer journey.

“It's also enabled a transformation away from us using backend systems for front-end tasks, to really having a front-end system that enables us to coordinate our processes and track everything from a marketing and acquisition perspective all the way through the funnel,” Maccan said.

NOW Finance’s model sees it operating multiple distribution channels working through intermediaries, with a direct-to-consumer channel for personal finance. The company’s plan to expand its consumer business has dictated the need for an efficient sales pipeline. 

“We've got more opportunity in terms of how we tailor the content that we provide based on the customer needs, to really deepen that customer engagement,” Maccan said.

A lifelong engagement

At Brighter Super, which was born from the merger of two industry superannuation funds with a retail superannuation fund, head of customer experience Brad Hancock said the goal was to take all of the warmth that could be delivered through an offline experience into online channels, to create digital experiences that were comforting and empathetic.

“I classify personalisation as individualisation, because every member for us is an individual,” Hancock said.

“Personalisation is all too often just used as a catchphrase for segmentation. People preach personalisation, but still just distribute generic offers.”

Hancock said his goal was for members to be able to engage with Brighter Super through whichever channel they felt most comfortable with, which meant numerous capabilities needed to be brought to its digital experience.

“What we're doing is building out specific use cases, but not losing sight of our ultimate goal to build an end-to-end seamless experience that a member actually is in the driving seat,” he said.

This thinking also extended to how Brighter Super conducted marketing campaigns, with a great emphasis on value-led metrics.

“For us, it's about sentiment perception,” Hancock said.

“We're storytellers, and we forget that sometimes as brands. The people that we serve in Queensland have worked a long time and we're custodians of that. We need to ensure they are getting advice at the right times and are maximizing their opportunities.

“For me, as the custodian of the omnichannel experience, the challenge is to capture intelligence and infer what those recommendations are. That's the criticality of omnichannel experience and individualisation.”

Mind your own customers

The concept of personalised digital experiences is not just restricted to consumer-focused organisations. At the multifaceted business software maker MYOB, its decision to invest in the customer data platform (CDP) Segment (now Twilio) around a decade ago was initially driven by the need for a customer data collection tool, but its usage has evolved significantly.

According to MYOB’s general manager for customer data and strategy, Tash Rahalkar, the platform is helping build stronger customer profiles across different touch points, enriched by behavioural data.

“We know that not every customer has the same needs,” Rahalkar said.

 “For the last few years we've been really working on personalisation at scale, which is selecting the right audience, creating a bespoke journey for them, and then orchestrating and executing that journey through the right touch points.”

Hence if a customer has expressed a preference for communications through a certain channel and in a certain manner, that is what they should experience.

“What it's allowed us to do is create bespoke experiences,” Rahalkar said.

“Every customer feels like MYOB is solving that need for them in that space. They get the information that is relevant to them and they're not bombarded.”

Rahalkar is now considering the role that AI might play in further enhancing that personalised digital experience.

“How do we use AI to better integrate, to better create journeys, to create better reporting on those journeys?” Rahalkar asked.

“How do we connect those pieces and create those feedback loops better so that we can have more real-time information?

“Predictive analytics is another place where we are heavily focused in the customer journey space. We started doing it last year and we're continuously evolving it because ultimately what we want is we want to not only predict, but to also learn from customer interactions – creating those rich understanding and pre-empting needs and making it seem more intuitive is ultimately the goal.”