In his keynote, McCormick explained the necessity for businesses to become insights-led and data-driven in order to deliver the products and services their customers desire. “In the ‘age of the customer’, businesses have given consumers a multitude of ways to engage with their brand; and essentially what that’s done is put the power in their hands.”
All that digital engagement translates into a wealth of customer data, ripe for analysis; but many organisations are struggling to keep up.
What they need is to to become digitally intelligent.
“Digital intelligence involves capturing and managing data insights to obtain a holistic understanding of our customers across a multitude of digital touchpoints. Then we use these insights to optimise our business decisions and customer experiences.”
Delivering a premium customer experience is the only way for enterprises and SMEs to gain a competitive edge and retain their market share in industries being disrupted by innovative startups. But McCormick asked, “How do we obsess about a customer that we don’t know or understand?” The answer is you can’t.
Insights-driven versus insight-influenced
To McCormick, a large contributing factor to the success of startups like Uber and Airbnb is that they’re insight-driven. This means that they use data and analytics at every opportunity to drive action and better business decision-making.
“The reality is that most organisations are insight-influenced, not insights-driven. Many are leveraging data and analytics to a certain extent to improve customer experience, but by no means are they doing that at every opportunity, at scale, and across the entire organisation.
“We all aspire to be data gurus, but most of us don’t actually know how to do it; we don’t know how to drive action using data. Digital analytics by itself is not valuable, the intelligence is.”
He warned that while digital intelligence is an opportunity now, it will be a necessity in a few short years.
Learn from the masters
McCormick advised that traditional companies learn from insights-driven businesses, which are masters at using data to drive action both internally and externally. According to a global Forrester study, these firms were generating a third of a trillion US dollars in 2015, and if their growth rate continues this total is expected to grow to $1.3 trillion by 2020.
“Where is that revenue coming from? It’s coming from products and services that just aren’t possible unless you are insights-driven.”
"These startups don’t buy technology for marketing or to deliver products. They buy it with the view to engage the consumer through the entire life-cycle of the brand, from the first time they discover the brand, to when they approach the company for products and services, to when they consume them.”
