Consumer insights have become a veritable source of information for brands; by deploying text mining and sentiment analysis, you can leverage machine learning and text analytics algorithms to categorize their sentiments into positive, negative, or neutral. In the age where the marketing landscape has become very competitive due to globalization, you need to ensure that your watchword is consumer-centrism.
Knowing what your customers want, how they want it, and when they want it, gives you an edge over the competition. Apart from that, it also enables you to have a well-planned strategy for your digital transformation initiatives.
What is digital transformation?
Walkme defines digital Transformation as simply reimagine your business processes through the implementation of new technologies and revamping legacy systems to improve operations. Most times, what pushes organizations to embark on digital transformation is to meet customers’ expectations.
Apart from adopting new technologies, digital transformation also involves training and re-training employees, changes in organizational culture and processes to ensure customers are happy. It also enhances an organization’s performance in the market. A digital transformation that is premised on a well-planned digital strategy ensures that you generate good revenue.
While the CEO initiates digital transformation, the success depends on the entire workforce. It must not be seen as the responsibility of the CIO and IT team alone; a great deal of collaboration is necessary among teams and departments.
Digital transformation has gone beyond being just a buzzword; according to a report, 77% of 100 Fortune 500 CIOs said that the top priority in their 2021 budgets is digital transformation. This is a clear indicator that you must embark on digital transformation if you want to remain relevant in the global market.
However, it will amount to a colossal waste of resources if you don’t have a digital strategy to work with. For you to belong to the winning group of companies, your digital transformation initiatives must focus on how you align and build your essential capabilities to even exceed your customers’ expectations.
The internet and advancement in technology have given the customer a voice; customers today expect a quality experience. This means that you must arm yourself with both behavioral and transactional customer insights.
It’s the era of big data, and deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning will help to make veritable sense out of customer insights as well as enhance personalized omnichannel experiences across the customer journey. The time has come for you to make your businesses adaptable, and that can only be possible if you put your customers at the center of your digital transformation.
The importance of consumer insights in digital transformation
You have a target audience; unfortunately, you are not the only one targeting this audience. That is why you need to know how they feel about your product or service.
Consumer insights serve as your roadmap for planning a digital strategy. What is the essence of digital transformation if, in the end, you are not adding any value to your customers?
Digital transformation should target adding value to your customer and your business. Data-based consumer insights will help your organization to better understand the behavior, sentiments, and motivations of your target audience, and building your digital strategy on this ensures that you have your customers’ actual desires as the central focus.
What technologies do you need to adopt? What organizational cultures must you change? A data-driven digital transformation enhances a better-personalized shopping experience for your customers.
Customers are more willing to transact businesses with organizations that understand their feelings and pain points and cater to them. Forbes reports that 74% of consumers get frustrated if they don’t get personalized content from a business.
If you embark on digital transformation, and you end up losing 74% of your customers because you refused to make use of their insights, the resources you utilized have gone down the drain. Consumer insights afford you the opportunity of knowing how customers feel about your brand and also discover what the competition is doing differently.
Overhauling the customer experience (CX)
If you decide to make consumer insights the pivot of your digital transformation, the very first thing you need is to arm yourself with data. This will reveal the real pain points of your consumers; that is the only way you can truly focus on a meaningful change.
By having the correct perspective of your consumers’ patterns and preferences, and a clear picture of where your brand stands on its CX, you can then apply techniques such as design thinking, and integrate digital transformation enablers such as artificial intelligence and advanced machine learning, to discover better ways of delivering a CX that will also add value to your business.
Some important tools you will need include charting the customer experience and journey, service blueprinting and using agile, which is a type of collaborative and iterative design process to innovatively develop and differentiate customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX) in smaller and faster increments.
The need for data-informed insights
Your digital strategy should proceed from consumer insights you generate from customer experience across the entire customer lifecycle. You need to gather all insights from brand awareness to things that stimulate customers into the buying process, and what makes a customer do a repeat purchase.
You need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, things that can make customers churn, and move on to the competition. Today, customers are more eager to discuss and have their pain points addressed; it’s, therefore, important that you get the relevant insights that will show you what they need and the way to engage with them.
Conclusion
Leveraging consumer insights for digital transformation ensures that you strike the right balance between generating value for the customer and value for the business. You will achieve this by accurately evaluating your overall customer landscape.
You must know which segments you should concentrate on, and then regularly engage with those customers in every interaction across the end-to-end journey. What you must aim to achieve with your digital transformation using consumer insights is a journey-led model instead of a functional operating one.
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