We're in the age of tech-enabled consumer intelligence.
Dr Jillian Ney Founder The Social Intelligence Lab
Forward-looking companies are turning customer insight into a source of competitive advantage, and these insight-driven organizations are known to out-perform their peers. However, today’s fast-paced environment means that organizations face rapid change in both technology and consumer behavior, and this is fundamentally changing the nature of customer insights.
Being able to simply search online to get answers to questions has changed expectations in the business world. Easy access to new information and knowledge has increased the desire to get insights immediately. There are more apps that generate large streams of data from online behavior patterns, social media, user reviews, geolocation data, voice search, and more diverse data sources that offer the promise of “instant insight”. New technologies provide the power to process these new data sources but they are not always straightforward to use, and other tech-enabled customer intelligence solutions allow us to research consumers in ways never before possible.
We’re in the age of tech-enabled consumer intelligence – or digital consumer intelligence.
We’re moving away from thinking about “market research” to developing “insight engines” which are democratized across the entire enterprise. In fact, Forrester has predicted that tech-enabled consumer intelligence will overtake traditional market, customer, and product research in the coming year. Making the challenge for insight professionals to not only make the right methodological considerations but to also find the right vendor selections.
Digital consumer intelligence solutions offer the ability to:
Ask respondents questions, which could be seen as a digitized version of more traditional research approaches.
Passively collect and analyze data generated through online activities, which is a move away from traditional research approaches and requires a new way of working.
The future of consumer insight is in blending both approaches. Historically there has been a healthy skepticism around passive data collection. The initial entry of “social listening” into the insights industry was bumpy, to say the least. For some, the approach produced inconsistent results and was often regarded as over-promising and under-delivering. However, this sector is maturing and is fundamentally part of digital consumer intelligence. Here’s why:
There has been an explosion in “language” based data sets. These “voice of the customer” sources are at an all-time high, and a prime example of passive data collection via everyday touchpoints and interactions with organizations. This data is vastly rich is insights and competitive advantage yet is still massively underused. When it comes to analyzing langauge data, the approach taken by social intelligence researchers can be adapted and used with these new data sources. Language data is an extension of social media intelligence.
There is a growing acceptance in the insights world that accuracy can be reduced for speed, particularly in situations involving less complex decisions.
There is a renewed understanding that social data is not “magical”. The social listening industry has matured to accept that the data could and should be blended with other data and research sources.
We have created this guide: Better, faster, cheaper consumer insight: discussions, challenges and opportunities in digital consumer intelligence to help you explore the changing nature of research and adoption of digital consumer intelligence.
Inside you will meet some of the leading thinkers, vendors, and service providers pushing the boundaries in digital consumer intelligence. It is designed to answer some of your most pressing questions about these new ways of working, and identify new opportunities to get insight better, faster and more cost-effective insight.
