Chapter 4
Staying on-trend
Closing the skills gap and committing to a company culture that advocates for lifelong learning should be central to any future business strategy. But unless you can combine the talent at your disposal with the right insights to understand how consumer trends are evolving, those skills are going to waste.
Whether a manufacturer is B2B or B2C, business success hinges on understanding and steering the organization’s direction in line with consumer trends and their changing priorities. For instance, sustainability and good corporate citizenship are of growing concern with customers around the globe. One in five 18-24-year-olds would be prepared to end their relationship with a brand if it demonstrated a lack of commitment to social or environmental causes, and 29% of consumers would walk away if a brand was found to have unethical trading practices.
Increasingly, within the B2B space, investment can hinge on Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria. This means organizations are expected to take responsibility for the business practices of every entity in their supply chain. But these linear trends, which are comparatively easy to track have been building year-on-year. Other changes are harder to identify, thanks to their speed, unless of course an organization has actionable customer insights to draw from and use to make business decisions.
Real insights should make an immediate, positive difference to the business as well as feeding into future strategies. For instance, the application of interaction analytics within the contact center environment can capture and operationalize real-time customer sentiment. And more importantly, it can identify the root causes of that sentiment. As such, this type of solution can be invaluable for assessing the performance of new products and for informing future development.
As well as measuring the performance of an individual product, advanced analytics solutions can be applied to capture the Voice of the Customer at a granular level and can be calibrated to identify and perfect customer personas. But for the greatest understanding, internal data needs to be combined with insights from external sources — such as the major social networks — in order to bring greater detail and perspective.
Key takeaways
Not all trends are linear in development or easy to identify.
Real-time data analysis is key to staying aligned with customer expectations and to optimizing future product development.