Every brand aspires to deliver standout customer experiences—but achieving that at scale starts with a simple question:
“Do we truly recognise our customers across every interaction?”
In today’s hyper-connected world, consumers expect more personalised, frictionless experiences. Yet for Australian businesses, recognising and understanding customers across an ever-widening web of digital, physical, and hybrid touchpoints has never been more complex, written by Melanie Hoptman, managing director, APAC, LiveRamp.
Why recognition is at the core of customer experience
We’re loyal to brands that know us—those that anticipate our needs, reduce friction, and offer value at the right time. It’s the same reason a local café feels more personal than a global chain: they recognise us.
For enterprise businesses in Australia, replicating this level of familiarity at scale is more challenging. The average customer journey can span hundreds of touchpoints. Without a unified, data-driven view of each customer, effective personalisation becomes impossible. According to Gartner, 71 per cent of B2C and 86 per cent of B2B customers expect companies to be well informed about their personal information during an interaction. Showcasing why collecting and unifying data across touchpoints is fundamental.
Three key pillars of data-driven personalisation
KPMG’s 2024 Customer Experience Excellence Report found that personalisation remains the most influential driver of loyalty with growing importance, stating that customers are more likely to stay loyal to a brand that offers tailored interactions and experiences that meet their individual preferences and needs. For Australian businesses to achieve this level of personalisation, here are three key steps:
1. Identity and identity resolution
· Before you can personalise, you must recognise. Identity resolution connects fragmented records (across web, app, store, support, etc.) into a single customer view.
· A single, unified customer view is critical to understanding every touchpoint customers have with your marketing—as well as where to activate in order to reach them at the right time.
2. Data collaboration & clean rooms
- By combining your first-party data with trusted partners’, you can unlock previously hidden insights and view your customers with renewed clarity.
- Often, your data only tells part of the story. Data collaboration refers to a range of solutions that enable you to tap the strength of your first-party data along with partners’—whether publishers including retailers, other brands, or other collaborators—and action on these insights.
- That’s why more brands are turning to second-party partnerships via one popular solution, data clean rooms—secure environments that allow for data collaboration without exposing raw customer information.
3. Going to the next level
- Once companies have started data collaboration, the sky is the limit: for example, collaborating with publishers can lead to more accurate understandings of ad exposures, while collaborating with retailers can unlock the missing link between advertising and conversions and purchases.
- Companies can even leverage third-party data to enhance the insights powering their marketing, improving targeting and reaching their customers more effectively.
Personalisation in a privacy-conscious era
Above all, true personalisation must respect customer boundaries. As privacy regulations tighten and third-party cookies continue to wane in effectiveness, Australian businesses are leaning into first-party data and pseudonymised identifiers to maintain trust while achieving business outcomes.
Modern data tools blend privacy-preserving techniques with high-performance analytics—ensuring that customer experience is never compromised in the name of compliance.
Recognising your customer is no longer a “nice-to-have”—it’s the critical first step in delivering meaningful, personalised experiences.
With the right data strategy, businesses can shift from fragmented, disjointed interactions to seamless journeys that reflect not just what customers do—but who they are and what they value.
Because in today’s world, personalisation is the product—and it all starts with data.
