Losing sight of the customer can mean losing out on business. By being intentional with the customer experience and truly being able to orchestrate it, the relationship between customer and company will grow stronger. 

“Digital technology, when connected effectively, is how companies can keep up with ever-increasing customer expectations for relevance, consistency and ultimately value in the customer relationship,” said Matt Parisi, director of product marketing at Tealium. 

Tealium is a customer data platform that uses tag management, APIs and other integrations to connect your data and manage digital properties, and it is a sponsor of Simpler Media Group’s recent Digital Experience Summit. To follow up on Matt’s session about first-party data strategies, SMG spoke with him.

Keeping Up with Customer Demands

Simpler Media Group: Why is digital marketing technology important to customer experiences?

Parisi: The customer journey is increasingly empowered by digital technology, in virtually every single industry. Not only is a significant chunk of the customer journey completed in a digital context, but digital technology can also better enable almost any customer engagement, even physical interactions. So in that way, digital becomes not only the most dominant channel, but also an enabling technology for any customer engagement. 

In case anybody doubted that, the pandemic really shined a spotlight on the companies that could harness digital versus those that couldn’t. It looks slightly different vertical to vertical, but the common thread is those companies that were agile with digital — and by extension their data — were the ones that thrived. 

SMG: How have digital marketing and tracking customer preferences changed in recent years?

Parisi: It might be easier to ask how they haven’t changed. The importance of first-party data, and the practices around it, have really undergone a seismic shift. While technology is constantly emerging to help solve these challenges, there’s also a constant flow of new restrictions to address. 

As I mentioned earlier, the pandemic really shined a spotlight on the importance and effectiveness of digital. Simultaneous to that, companies’ use of digital has been maturing, societal expectations have been shifting, governments have implemented regulations and…