The 2022 Connected Awards: Announcing the Top 20 Customer Data Innovators
Customer experience is a competitive advantage for the most successful brands. The companies that do it best rely on a complex network of people, data, and technology to deliver experiences that their customers love. For the inaugural Connected Awards, we’re excited to recognize the top 20 customer data innovators–the individuals that are connecting the dots and growing some of the most beloved brands in the world. See the winners below.
Spanish on-demand order app Glovo provides customers with an incredibly diverse set of products, including groceries, meals, and pharmacy goods. Oliver and his team use customer data to design experiences that make it easy for customers to find what they need. “Customers want to find stores they like and pick individual products or dishes to buy. We aim to make this experience easier by providing seamless discovery and recommendation experiences that delight the user.”
Anne describes the ideal customer experience as “an experience that makes you feel something. Maybe it’s special, empowered, informed or successful, but it is a clear and definite feeling.” Anne and her team leverage customer data to understand how sports fans are engaging with the various digital and linear touchpoints Bleacher Report provides.
HBO is home to an extensive library of films, documentaries, and series. Chuck and his team help departments across HBO Max use marketing technology to deliver experiences that make it easier for customers to discover the right content. As Chuck describes, “we serve as a bridge between Marketing, Product, and Engineering, driving new integrations or capabilities that enable marketing table stakes like personalization to campaign performance measurement.”
“In our world where we are moving towards always mobile,” Phil describes, “having cross-platform uniformity of user experience is important.” Phil works with teams ranging from analytics to product design to consolidate requirements and ensure everyone has access to the data they need. Recently, he’s worked on connecting video engagement to social sentiment and retention data into a single system for engagement insights.
Unifying customer data from multiple sources is difficult, especially when that data is coming from both online and offline realms. TJ and his team leverage their marketing technology stack to resolve online and offline data to a single data set, generate insights about customer preferences, and deliver “frictionless, clear, timely, consistent, and relevant interactions with our customers, so that each touchpoint adds value.”
For Sandra, great customer experiences should not just be frictionless, they should be so easy that they leave the customer pleasantly surprised and “left wanting to share their experience with family or friends.” Sandra’s expertise in audience creation and data analysis allows her to support teams across the NBCUniversal organization in their efforts to improve customer engagement and retention.
Tatcha’s customers engage with the brand across a variety of channels, owned and non-owned -- tatcha.com, Sephora, in-person shopping, and more. Jacqueline leverages customer data to deliver experiences that “meet people where they are” across these channels. For owned channels in particular, Jacqueline is focused on personalizing the customer experience, both for first-time browsers and repeat customers, in order to earn trust and make customers feel provided for.
As Marks & Spencer have begun to focus on leveraging data to drive the business, Aarron has been key to enabling customer data adoption across the organization. Aarron works with Marketing and Product teams to make sure that they have the customer data they need, when and where they need it, to execute innovative and engaging customer experiences. Since joining, Aarron has helped M&S innovate their Sparks loyalty program, unify online and offline data, and power real-time customer experiences across channels.
Pradeep is a product veteran that has transformed the way that teams across Postmedia leverage customer data. From Pradeep's point of view, the ideal customer experience is "serving the right content to the right user at the right time on an easy-to-use, clutter-free interface, across devices and platforms with high-performing websites and apps." Recently, Pradeep has worked with stakeholders from Product, Engineering, Operations, and Analytics to rethink and redesign user profile creation, and has also been able to connect data from across multiple sources to power content-based recommendations on Postmedia's websites.
Miguel is a digital change agent that has driven technology adoption at multiple large organizations throughout his career. He is an expert in developing modern technology stacks, designing connected voice experiences, and developing data-informed decision making at large scale. Learn more about Miguel’s experience in this episode of our podcast, Connected, by mParticle.
Danny was a critical driver of the launch of Discovery’s Discovery+ streaming platform in 2020. Since then, and throughout his time at Discovery, Danny has been the architect of customer data intelligence at the organization, leveraging customer data infrastructure solutions to supply various internal teams with real-time customer insights so that they can execute analytics, BI and marketing use cases. Learn more about Danny’s journey in this episode of our podcast, Connected, by mParticle.
Alexis is the fulcrum of customer data systems at RBI, the umbrella company that owns Burger King, Popeyes, Tim Hortons, and more. He leads the configuring, troubleshooting, and enabling of customer data flows, ensuring that high-quality customer data is accessible in the dozens of data activations being leveraged by teams across the organization.
The possibilities of the mobile customer experience have fundamentally transformed the way consumers engage with airlines when traveling. Katie works on delivering first-class mobile experiences to JetBlue customers, leveraging mParticle to collect and connect user behavioral data while also improving developer efficiency. With a modern, highly-performant app, JetBlue has removed friction to promote self-service with an astounding 5-10% increase in monthly active users month over month.
Punnoose has been a champion of the customer experience throughout his career, holding leadership roles at HeadSpace and Spokeo before joining Funimation. Throughout that time, he has consistently brought people, process, and tech together to improve data quality and deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Frank works closely with Gemini’s engineering team to develop their customer data architecture. By always anchoring on the long-term impacts of implementation decisions, he has driven Gemini to build a data architecture that allows marketing teams to leverage customer data at scale.
Nick caught the startup bug early, and after more than ten years working at consumer-focused mobile apps he hasn’t yet been able to kick it. In his words, “I love growing companies, it’s what I do!” Through his career, Nick has built a deep expertise in growth marketing across both product- and marketing-led organizations. Since joining Route two years ago, Nick and his team have already grown their user base 10x. To learn more about Nick’s journey, you can listen to this episode of our podcast, Connected, by mParticle.
Julian is an online marketing and advertising industry veteran that has consistently championed the importance of the customer experiences throughout his career. At Digicel, Julian connects people, tech, and data across the organization, and consistently facilitates cross-functional collaboration in order to drive business initiatives forward.
Implementing customer data infrastructure often requires collaboration between multiple teams across the organization. Adib is an expert at bringing key stakeholders together to deploy solutions and set the company up to deliver world-class products and experiences at scale.
Celeste has transformed the way in which KFC US uses customer data. By implementing infrastructure that allows the organization to not only access a complete view of each customers’ mobile app, website, and campaign engagement, but also to activate that data across a wide variety of engagement channels, Celeste enables her team to accelerate time to data value and drive the business forward.
ChowNow’s commission-free, modern digital ordering solutions allow our favorite neighborhood eateries to provide digital experiences on-par with enterprise-scale restaurant companies. Jordan is a driving force within the organization and has brought stakeholders together from Product, Marketing, Engineering, and Analytics for detailed data planning exercises, resulting in easier implementation QAing and better customer data quality.
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