How Top Brands Use Data to Deliver Unmatched Customer Experiences

Most companies don’t realize they’re losing customers—until it’s too late.

A clunky checkout process, an impersonal interaction, or even a single frustrating moment can send a customer running to a competitor. Today, consumers expect brands to know what they want before they even ask. And the companies known for exceptional customer experiences—like Duolingo, Nike, and The Ritz-Carlton—don’t just offer great service; they engineer unforgettable interactions powered by one key ingredient: data.

World-class customer experiences don’t happen by accident. They’re built on deep insights into behavior, preferences, and needs. And the brands that win? They’re the ones who can use those insights to anticipate what customers want before they even say it.

Why data is the foundation of CX

Every company that successfully provides engaging customer experience understands the role of data in eliminating guesswork. There are two conceptual steps for activating data to do this:

The essential data types to understand customer needs

The first step in improving your customer experience is gathering relevant data. To really get to know your customers’ needs, the three types of data to look at are:

• Behavioral data: How customers interact with your brand (e.g., website clicks, app usage, purchase paths).
• Transactional data: What customers buy, how often, and what influences their purchasing decisions.
• Feedback data: Direct customer input, including reviews, surveys, and social media mentions.

The promise of real-time data for CX

After collecting your data trifecta, the next step is building the infrastructure to act on it in real time. Real-time data enables businesses to adapt instantly, meeting customer needs the moment they arise.

With real-time data, you can do things like:

• Adjust product recommendations based on current browsing behavior
• Offer timely discounts on abandoned-cart items
• Personalize follow-ups with relevant support or feedback requests
• Ensure customer service reps have full context before assisting a customer

When companies move from just data collection to taking action in real-time, they eliminate friction, enhance personalization, and deliver seamless customer experiences.

Now that you know how to build a foundation for a strong customer experience, let’s look at three companies that excel at using data to make customers feel understood and appreciated.

Duolingo: Gamifying learning with data-driven insights

Duolingo isn’t just a language learning app—it’s a data-driven engine for user engagement. With over 500 million users, the company has mastered the art of keeping learners motivated by leveraging behavioral and engagement data.

How Duolingo uses data to drive engagement and retention:

• Smart notifications: Duolingo’s algorithms analyze user behavior to determine when and how often to send push notifications, ensuring reminders feel helpful rather than spammy.
• Adaptive difficulty: By tracking how users interact with lessons, Duolingo dynamically adjusts content difficulty to keep learners challenged but not frustrated.
• A/B testing at scale: Duolingo continuously runs thousands of A/B tests on everything from button colors to sentence phrasing, ensuring that each tweak improves engagement and retention.

By optimizing its product experience based on real user data, Duolingo has built one of the most engaging learning platforms in the world, proving that data can make education both effective and fun.

Nike: Personalization at scale

You know it for its iconic sportswear—but Nike is also a digital powerhouse that uses data to create highly personalized experiences for its customers. Whether through its apps, digital storefronts, or loyalty programs, Nike harnesses behavioral data to predict customer needs and enhance their buying journey.

How Nike uses data to tailor experiences:

• Nike Membership: The Nike app tracks user behavior, past purchases, and browsing habits to offer personalized product recommendations, exclusive offers, and early access to new releases.
• AI-powered product recommendations: Nike’s e-commerce platform uses AI to analyze customer preferences and suggest the right shoes, apparel, or gear based on style, fit, and past behavior.
• Personalized fitness coaching: By tracking workouts, steps, and performance, Nike’s fitness apps provide users with customized training plans and insights, keeping them engaged and motivated.

Nike’s data-driven approach to personalization strengthens brand loyalty and creates seamless experiences for millions of customers worldwide.

The Ritz-Carlton: Luxury is in the details

At The Ritz-Carlton, luxury isn’t just about five-star amenities—it’s about making every guest feel like the most important person in the room.

The secret? An obsession with tracking guest preference data. The Ritz-Carlton gathers data from front-desk interactions, loyalty program interactions, online feedback surveys and more, then empowers its staff to act on that data to make each stay feel bespoke.

How The Ritz-Carlton uses data to elevate every stay:

• Personalized perks: Transactional data lets The Ritz-Carlton treat guests to memorable moments, from having their favorite drink ready to receiving personalized gifts, creating a unique and special experience during their stay.
• AI-Driven service: When guests customize their stay through The Ritz-Carlton’s digital concierge services, the brand’s AI-powered assistant “ChatGenie” learns from their behavioral and transactional data to proactively suggests personalized recommendations.
• Guest preference database: The Ritz-Carlton ensures that every staff member has access to real-time guest data. A dietary restriction noted by a chef in Barcelona is seamlessly honored when the same guest dines in New York—delivering luxury through anticipation.

This commitment to anticipation is why guests keep returning to The Ritz-Carlton—and become lifelong advocates.

The future of CX: Predict, personalize and delight

The world’s most beloved brands don’t wait for customers to tell them what they need. They use data to predict, personalize, and proactively enhance every interaction.

Want to follow in their footsteps? Some areas you can focus on are:

• Building a customer-centric culture like The Ritz-Carlton has with its guest preferences database, and like Nike does by using customer behavior data to shape personalized fitness experiences through its apps
• Deeply understanding and predicting customer needs as Duolingo does by using AI to adapt lessons to individual learning styles and The Ritz-Carlton does by preparing amenities that match recorded guest preferences
• Prioritizing personalization as Nike does with its AI-powered product recommendations and Duolingo does by tailoring exercise difficulty based on user performance.
• Empowering your team as The Ritz-Carlton does by giving front-line staff access to real-time guest data, ensuring exceptional, tailored service.

To do this, you also need to have the right tools to collect, analyze, and act on your data. Amplitude is the trusted platform for all your data needs—behavioral, transactional, feedback, and more—and it delivers insights on that data in real-time. We help you build better customer experiences that aren’t accidents, guesswork, or gut-feeling—they’re driven by data.