CONSUMER TRENDS AND BEHAVIORS: LEARNING TO ADAPT

Consumer trends and behaviors are constantly shifting. Learning to gather, ingest, and interpret information as quickly as possible, and on a consistent running basis, will be crucial to staying ahead of the curve in coming years. By way of example, over 27.1 billion devices will be connected online and capable of transmitting feedback by 2021, and 99% of organizations note that being data-driven conveys competitive advantage. But at the same time, 97% of data on consumer trends and behaviors is currently going unused by organizations according to market researcher Gartner, and Accenture notes that just 1 in 4 employees describe themselves as data literate.

Keeping this in mind, it’s important to be aware: Boosting your business’ data literacy, and ability to work with analytics, requires the use of both high- and low-tech solutions. That’s because part of the challenge lies in improving data management schemes and IT infrastructures, while an equally large portion lies in the need to better educate and upskill your workforce. Because with nine in ten businesses admitting that managing information on consumer trends and behaviors remains a dilemma, while a third still struggle to access trustworthy information when making decisions? It’s not just about being able to provide your team with helpful details, but also learning and insights you can reliably count on. To this extent, providing tools that can help workers quickly and concisely interpret signals that the market is sending, and translate them into action business intelligence, is crucial. But at the same time, so is learning to effectively juggle the growing mountains of information that are being collected from customers.

Shockingly though, only half of all enterprises say they trust their own data, per the most recent Global Data Management Report, while 95% note that their business suffers from the poor quality of data that they utilize. You can begin to solve this problem by implementing universal tools across your IT infrastructure that introduce standardized methods of collecting, sorting, and sharing data across your entire organization. These unified and centralized systems shouldn’t just make it easier for workers across the organization to access this information anytime, anywhere on-demand. They should also be designed to be contextual (capable of using insights to provide informed interactions); able to apply these insights in real-time; and built to be scalable and adaptable to myriad contexts. Likewise, in addition to being able to ingest large amounts of data as it’s created, these high-tech systems should be capable of automatically scrubbing and verifying this information’s accuracy on a routine (daily, weekly, monthly, etc.) basis.