American Express, VP of Enterprise Data Platforms: We’re Keeping Data at the Heart of Everything We Do

Purvi Shah, VP, Enterprise Data Platforms, American Express, speaks with Leonard Maganza, Chief Customer Officer, Syniti, about customer experience, digital experience, and data. 

Shah shares that she has been at Amex for about 10 years and currently leads the enterprise data platforms team. Responsible for the company's global data ecosystem, Shah focuses on bringing data together across multiple systems, unifying the information to be used and leveraged as a data asset to power customer experience. She formerly served as the president of Customer 360, an enterprise asset and CRM for American Express that allows Amex to understand customers and their relationships across the life cycle — from acquisition to servicing them and detecting credit and fraud risk.

According to Shah, data, data management, and digital transformation are intertwined to create the most remarkable customer experience for Amex customers. For example, Amex offers merchants the opportunity to give discounts or incentives to customers who shop at their locations. They use AI and machine learning and the data they provide to understand customers’ needs, customer behavior, and affinities to be offered at the right time. That is very important, Shah emphasizes, as it will make the customer return to the Amex app or the Amex website, log in to see what information is available, and enjoy a delightful customer experience. If they love high-end shopping, they’ll be able to see offers that are most relevant and personalized to them. 

Shah wishes she had a crystal ball, but listening to the customer as one looks to the future is essential, she says. “So, we constantly and consistently do that to understand the data. How do they interact with us?” Via a variety of channels that American Express provides to offer the best services. They have actual conversations with customers to understand what they're doing, what they need, and how Amex should continue to evolve to offer them the best services, products, and overall customer experiences.

Amex, according to Shah, is always anticipating a customer’s need, and is using the data and machine learning models to advance this field further. And Amex is committed to being customer-centric. While it’s well-known that Amex offers a lot of card products, they also have a lot of non-card products for their customers. To make sure that the information a customer gets on a mobile app or Amex website is extremely intuitive and meets the customer's needs, Amex is moving away from product-centric interactions to more customer-centric ones while keeping data at heart.

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