Drowning in Data, Starving for Insights: Australian organisations’ customer data challenge
Harnessing customer data to drive business growth is an aspiration many Australian organisations have while still finding it challenging to achieve. While organisations often recognise the value of data and see its potential, it tends to sit in the business as a technical asset rather than a strategic resource.
The difference in the potential of data, customer data in particular, often lies in how organisations approach it. Too often it is just seen as something to be managed rather than as an accelerator of business performance.
This observation, and subsequent lessons on how to make more of customer data and harness it for business growth, was the topic of a presentation recently held at data and analytics professional event, CDAO Sydney.
The session, held by Billy Loizou (pictured), Area Vice President for customer data cloud platform Amperity, as well as Amperity’s APAC Solution Consulting Lead Sam Bessey, provided insights on treating customer data as the essential “fuel source” for modern business success.
During the session, Loizou and Bessey highlighted three key trends influencing Australian investment related to customer data: privacy laws creating compliance pressures and risk around data management, the rise of AI for content creation, and the growth of retail media, which in Australia is tipped to reach more than $3 billion in revenue by the end of the year. This growth mirrors the confidence seen in the United States, where retail media is expected to reach US$100 billion in revenue by 2026.
These trends set the backdrop of the importance of securely and effectively leveraging customer data for success in a highly competitive landscape that is also vulnerable to technological change.
What Fuels Success? A Look Across Industries
Every successful and performant person or enterprise is fuelled by something. There is a foundational imperative to every success that often takes time, discipline, and effort to cultivate.
Loizou sought to make a point about this by sharing some parallels across industries. Highlighting that he believes looking outside of one’s own industry can prove beneficial, Loizou pointed to three examples where an underlying ‘fuel’ or benefit could inspire growth or change if correctly activated.
For instance, one might look to NBA star LeBron James, Loizou suggested, and ask how it was possible that James, who is 40, is still playing in the NBA, has been twice named MVP, is a four-time NBA champion, and has played for 21 seasons, was still operating at peak performance.
“He spends $1.5 million per year – 10% of his salary – on nutrition and fitness. He gets 10 hours of sleep per night. He’s a believer in that the way he fuels his body impacts productivity and performance,” Loizou said.
“And it stands the test of time because there haven’t been many number one draft picks that have lasted this long.”
Loizou then turned to the electric vehicle industry, noting that lithium batteries have changed the way performance is quantified, they are environmentally greener, and are selling well, with 114,000 sold in the past year.
“$1 will get you three times further with an electric car than it will with petrol,” Loizou said. “So if I said to a business leader, you can get three times return on your investment just by changing the fuel source, they would probably all jump and say, ‘please help’.”
The third parallel Loizou referenced was the wine industry in the Hunter Valley. Boasting more than 150 wineries, it’s one of the region’s most effective wine markets. The Valley’s success is not a coincidence of course.
“It’s the soil and the nutrients that fuels the ability to create market-leading wines,” he said.
The point being: fuel source matters, Loizou said. And in customer-facing businesses, customer data is the fuel; it’s a foundational element that impacts performance and productivity.
Where Value Comes From in Customer Data
Taking a closer examination of maximising value from customer data, Loizou said there were certain indicators organisations should track to understand how their customers relate to their brands.
“The three most important metrics in the boardroom today are net profit, customer acquisition and revenue retention. You can’t physically calculate these without customer data, it’s physically in the equation,” Loizou said.
These metrics impact three key strategic imperatives: identifying the next best step to take for every customer, knowing who the right customers to acquire are, and knowing which customer relationships to maximise.
“A lot of the CFOs we talk with today say, ‘We don’t need to get more customers. We need to keep the customers we have; we just need them to buy more profitable products because that’s how you grow’,” Loizou said.
Loizou also addressed the common challenge of “drowning in data and starving for insights”. The market is increasingly crowded, with a recent publication reporting that there are now 15,000 martech solutions available, most requiring some view of customer data.
In such a busy space, understanding where to begin and which customer data to prioritise presents a significant challenge for many organisations. With various types of data available—profiles, transactions, behaviours, events, loyalty information—determining where to focus efforts becomes a crucial first step.
Accelerators
Whether it’s customer profiles, transactions, behaviours, events, loyalty data, or some other metric, it can be difficult to know exactly what to prioritise and how to start building valuable customer insights.
During the presentation, Loizou and Bessey indicated three factors they believe to be the accelerators for extracting value from customer data. Those being: building around the data warehouse, identity resolution, and actionability.
Speaking to the first factor, Bessey explained that getting value from data meant getting it out of the warehouse. Traditionally, he argued, organisations have relied on packaged solutions like CRMs and marketing tools that often create additional data silos. These solutions typically lack the tooling to connect directly with modern data infrastructure and require connectors to communicate with other systems in the organisation.
While there has been a shift in recent years toward more modular, composable solutions that sit adjacent to or directly inside the warehouse, these approaches still present challenges. They often require significant time investment for data preparation and may not have all the necessary connectors to upstream and downstream systems.
Bessey suggested a hybrid approach, combining the benefits of both models by building directly on the warehouse while providing business-friendly tools as a packaged solution. This approach enables organisations to leverage their existing data infrastructure while empowering non-technical users.
“Better data leads to better results, giving you a more accurate and complete view of your customer,” he said. “As a starting point, all the modeling, the insights, and analytics you’re trying to drive in the business are that much more accurate as a result.”
The second accelerator, identity resolution, addresses a significant challenge for many organisations. According to Bessey, most customer data tools assume identity resolution has already been handled elsewhere, leaving organisations to tackle this complex problem themselves.
When faced with multiple records for what might be the same customer, for example, three different records for an “Alex Reynolds”, organisations typically resort to writing rules or code to try to resolve these identities. This approach is problematic not only because it requires significant technical resources, but because it’s never fully complete.
Amperity’s approach to this challenge involves what they call a “technological stitch”—a patented methodology using 45 different algorithms to identify connections between customer records.
Strong Insights Inspire Successful Actions
The third accelerator, actionability, brought together the first two accelerator points to illustrate how organisations can turn unified customer data into practical business outcomes.
Bessey emphasised that once organisations have extracted data from the warehouse and resolved identity challenges, the next critical step is making that information accessible and useful for business teams, not just technical specialists.
Bessey referenced the issues presented at the beginning of the presentation concerning privacy laws, retail media and AI, highlighting that irrespective of challenges, a focus on business outcomes and a sophisticated customer pipeline would create the best-case scenario for success.
“Rather than talking about the challenges or headwinds, let’s talk about business outcomes,” Bessey said. He outlined how unified customer data enhanced privacy compliance through better data lineage tracking, enabled more accurate AI model development, and improved marketing effectiveness through integrated platform connections.
The message was clear: effectively managing customer data, nurturing it and accelerating value extraction will empower organisations and make them resilient to undulating market shifts, technological advancement and change while increasing their potential for growth and profitability.
To learn more about harnessing customer data to fuel growth, click here to download the presentation
