This is an excerpt from a presentation made by Reed Cundiff, General Manager – Customer & Market Research, Microsoft, at LatentView’s Fourth Analytics Roundtable
You wake up one day to realize that the world around you has changed. It’s no longer news that there is a plethora of new data types available. What is new, is the growth trajectory that these have been on. The volume and velocity of data keeps increasing over time.
With this volume and velocity, the fundamental question about data becomes even more pressing: How can we extract the most business value?
To answer this, companies must take stock of where they see the market research discipline heading and where they want to be as a team. They must then embark upon several journeys to adapt to the changing insights landscape. These include social intelligence, telemetry, as well as the team’s way of working.
SOCIAL INTELLIGENCE: The social intelligence journey is a step-wise path to build a social intelligence platform and practice to deliver increased value from insights over time.
Many of the off-the-shelf solutions might have great features, but nothing that is best-in-class. WE should look at building our own platform from the ground up. Hire technical and analytics experts to work with Corporate Research to drive the platform and practice forward. From there, build analytic expertise within other research teams.
Here’s how you can see impact at different levels.
Level 1 Impact: With the platform and practice in place, the team’s primary focus is now on insights that inform critical business decisions. Social intelligence will enable you to monitor social volume and sentiment. This in turn will enable your business partners to measure master brands, product and service brands, and discover specific topic themes. While this type of analysis alone generates business impact, there is definitely scope for more.
Level 2 Impact: The next level is to combine the power of social intelligence with other analyses you do. The goal is to integrate social into all audience and market insights delivered. By training the team to think social intelligence every time they work on a new business issue, you will be able to foster even greater business impact. Even at this stage, there is scope for more.
Level 3 Impact: The third and final level of impact is to use social sentiment as a predictor of business performance. It will serve as a clear indicator
TELEMETRY: Like social intelligence, extracting value from telemetry requires a few changes within your team:
• Instead of acting like farmers, act like miners and apply a high degree of precision when mining data.
• Develop the skill to see and avoid the pitfalls of working with telemetry data.
• Examine both telemetry and perception data captured through surveys because in combination, they shed a clearer light on the entire customer or market situation.
Over time, companies should look to evolve their skillsets and the way they work. With the volume of data that is now available and stakeholder expectations, developing a data platform and dashboards must become a team priority. Today, the primary focus should be on business impact and required skills are a blend of research expertise, business knowledge and interpersonal communications.
As the insights landscape continues to evolve, social intelligence, telemetry and the evolution of teams will remain CMR Big Bets for the foreseeable future.
