The rate and scale of change going on at the minute is not something I have experienced before but, I suspect that’s created a situation where companies of all sizes are having to work across departments as a unit to consider their response and offerings.
Clearly I am biased towards the use of data but in order for informed decisions to be made a trusted and proven centralised ‘data store’ should be in place to assess the proposals from a multi dimensional perspective. Very often it comes down to numbers on a spreadsheet, but, I just feel that the smarter decisions are going to be based around maintaining customer loyalty and providing something that the customer looks back on and thinks ‘that was good’.
The easy target is supermarkets who all have their loyalty schemes in place with customer bases that small to mid size companies would love to have, combined with the insight that they have into our habitual ways they really do have an opportunity here to make sure that they provide the ‘that was good’ moment.
In order to do that then the problem really needs to be understood, there needs to be a really clear measurable objective to the solution that is being discussed, creating data models to highlight the size of that problem or opportunity and then putting several offerings in place to be considered will require data to be exposed at a level which maybe hasn’t been required before. Not identifying the right problem, or using the data out of context or not knowing if the data is correct will in my opinion be the biggest risk to the short to medium term decisions being made right now.
The opportunity and need for data exploitation, discovery, enablement and ultimately impact is huge right now. Good luck to anyone in a position where you are needing to put solutions in place quickly, no doubt you’re under pressure but I hope that you are allowed to be creative and offer a memorable experience to your customers.
I’m looking forward to seeing the offerings that come out during this time and learning afterwards what worked well.