Selling to Customers Who Know More Than You!

The word revolution is overused, but in the past five odd years, there has been a significant one. A technology revolution that has empowered customers and impacted the way they engage with products and service providers. Thanks to a combination of technologies, the Customer of 2015 is vastly different from 2010.

The Encyclopedia Effect: The Customer Knows More

When a customer walks into either a retail or an online store today, the smart money is on the probability that he or she knows more about the product than the available product literature. Apart from high turnaround and relative inexperience of store staff, the major factor that has exacerbated this trend is on-demand information. Customers today have all the means to learn and thoroughly research their purchase in terms of features, price comparisons, technologies, accessories, and performance.  Contributing to this is the ease of garnering information via social media. For example, just observe the amount of information provided by Amazon for any product, and the information posted by the users in the reviews section. 

How ready is a business to deal with this customer? When Customers are empowered with on-demand information, why are businesses still stuck with outdated information?

You the Customer vs. You the Business Decision-maker

You, as the customer, carry information on the go. You have Wikipedia, Amazon, Google, and every possible product database in your pocket. But as the enterprise decision-maker, you probably have only one source of information and can rarely combine information from other data sources. Have you ever taken a print out of a product brochure to a retail store to make a purchase? But in your office, you do print BI reports before taking them to meetings. Even if the report is not printed, just the mere fact that it is a ‘report’, makes it already outdated by the time it got saved as a file! Do you see the contrast? You as the customer are empowered with on-demand information, but as a business decision-maker, you are restricted and forced to depend on outdated information for important decision-making. Remember that your business is facing customers armed with information on the go!

Are you making it easier for yourself to find that information? Are you enabling or constricting this behavior? Does your sales process factor in the always addressable customer? 

The Real-time Effect: The decision making cycles in seconds

Back then about 5 years ago, you heard a song, you tried to find out what it was, and maybe you heard it again, then on the radio. Somebody told you what the song was if you were able to hum it. Or you searched the lyrics on the internet. You went to the music store or Amazon, and bought the CD, at whatever the arbitrary price point for the CD was.

Now you hear and like a song that you've never heard before, you "Shazam" it, and it tells you the song and artist, and offers you the chance to buy it with a single click off iTunes. In 30 seconds, from never having heard the song, you now own it.

This telescoping marketing and sales cycle is what the mobile world is accelerating. Real time is in. Waiting is out. Customers are starting to expect this in more and more areas. Whether it’s your bank account or your energy bill, or an itemized break up of your estimate for fitting out a new nursery, there is an increased expectation to make it available now. How real time is your business? How long do your customers have to wait for information about your products and services? How much self-service do you enable in the information buffet?

The journey isn’t over yet, but not recognizing and adapting to these changes already could mean that you are out of step with the customer of today.

Is your enterprise suffering from “Data Divide”?

Businesses today rely heavily on all forms of data for crucial decision-making. With increasing data sources and continually changing technology, data gets spread and stored in different silos as the business grows. There comes a point where the divide between collecting or recording data and utilizing it efficiently for business goals grows wider obstructing access to quality data.

Data Divide broadly covers the enterprise-level data issues that businesses face:

• Lack of data usage in a timely manner
• Cumbersome process to access high quality data
• Inability to offer continuous innovation

Technology defines the capabilities of an enterprise to compete in a global arena. As the era of big data takes hold, it is time for businesses and IT to collaborate and harness technology to create a fully supportive platform for business insights for the future. Just relying upon the traditional BI products, which are meant for IT and not for business users, is not enough to bridge the data divide.

Effective data analysis defines market winners

An effective analysis and reporting can elevate data from mere information to knowledge to competitive edge. Besides taking right decisions, business executives may actually create new business opportunities with the right type of data. Working with poorly defined analytics, incomplete data sources, and inability to handle mixed data types, can lead to partial information and knowledge, and the false belief among the business executives that the right decision has been made.

Use technology to simplify data

Technology should make data simple and understandable, rather than technical and complicated. With use of technical terminology and jargon, IT loses focus of the issues at hand. Businesses are not concerned with discussions on using SQL versus Non-SQL databases or Hadoop as a persistent store. Whether IT wants to regard the data sources as just another data problem, or cloudify it in with the big data debate, makes no difference. Businesses are interested in creating strategies and solutions based on the data to attain their enterprise objectives.

The key for IT and business is to communicate in the same language, the “human” language to understand and support each other. IT must ensure that it has the right tools to serve the business needs.

Blend data across data sources

As new data sources and types emerge, they have to be assimilated to prevent data silos. Old methods of data analytics can no longer keep pace with these requirements. Just analyzing data and generating hard-coded reports is not enough to convince customers and stakeholders about information security and to fulfil the laws of different geographies. The businesses must promptly demonstrate that governance is being actively monitored and maintained, instead of paying a mere lip service. A business-centric view of the problem and a result-oriented view for the present and future can bring a true differentiation in the market.

Identify capabilities to handle mixed data types

Traditional databases are passé. Today, it is important to work with mixed data sources – internal or external, structured or unstructured, relational or reference-only. When enterprises use several data sources to satisfy specific application needs, they hardly gain any contextual insights. All these data sources must be pulled together and analyzed through a single system that can be used effectively by the business executives themselves.

A true analytics solution can provide the much needed environment where decisions are made effectively, timely, and optimally. The right tools can make data fluid, ensure easy and right access for everyone in the enterprise, and take the business and its operations to the next level.