Helen Gorman is Head of Consultancy at OysterCatchers. She is a strategic and creative blue-chip marketing and business leader with a strong legacy of commercial and creative success with P&L responsibility. She has worked at GSK, Britvic and last year headed up a digital transformation programme for the Post Office.
On September 26th at Technology for Marketing 2019, Helen is moderating the panel In God We Trust – Everyone Else Bring Data.
In this Q&A Helen gives her opinion on the way forward for crafting a great customer experience and which sectors are on the front foot.
Where do you see opportunities for brands to improve the customer experience with creative use of data?
There’s still work to be done on crafting compelling customer insight from data. I see the need to dive deeper into interrogation and obsessively ask why a customer behaves in a certain way so as to harness such insight to maximise customer experience
Which brand do you think is delivering a great customer experience based on data insight and why?
The car industry has become highly sophisticated. I recently read a case study on Toyota, which knows its customers so well that it delivers a brilliant experience at every point along the customer journey – driving strong sales growth for the brand. Just look, for instance, at Toyota’s brilliant work on electric vehicles – from initial interest all the way through to purchase.
What sector do you think is lagging behind in tech adoption for marketing purposes?
I think the established UK high street retail sector is lagging behind, particularly in ‘real time’ customer data and acting with relevancy and pace to win.
What’s the best way to encourage customers to share their personal data with brands?
Be authentic and deliver a genuine customer benefit as an outcome. If you share, and your experience becomes more personalised and / or relevant, then there is value in that sharing. For example, I have recently shared my data with Bloom & Wild and now getting lots of value and useful comms from the brand.
What’s the most hyped technology that’s underdelivering at the moment, in your opinion?
Automated algorithms. They can deliver, hone and optimise performance plans and may ultimately replace us in that sphere. BUT, they don’t drive the core idea, and ultimately human beings buy ideas. Whilst customers are consuming many different channels (all of which can be automated) they are not reacting to the choice of channel itself but to the content within it – the idea.
