Why using the right insights is important to gain competitive advantages

Why using the right insights is important to gain competitive advantages

Insights come in many flavors. Customer insights, consumer insights, competitor insights, market insights, company insights, operational insights, process insights, sales insights, marketing insights... You get the drift. All types of enterprise data (big, medium, small, and petite), as well as external data, fuel these insights and make your business smarter about how you engage with your customers, how you run your business, and how you anticipate market shifts. Whether you arrive at these insights through machine learning methods or advanced customer research methods, how you use insights to drive customer obsession is a key driver of success in the age of the customer. This article features fundamental ideas on the tools, technologies, and best practices to leverage all types of insights about your customers, company, and competition.

Remove your blinders and stay ahead of competition with better insights

Market and competitive intelligence (M&CI) is a fundamental strategic business competency with the goal of developing, sharing, and maintaining actionable perspective on a company’s opportunities and positioning as market dynamics change. To accomplish this, firms mine the tsunami of available information about markets and competitors online, both within their organization and from their partners and customers. Did you know that there is a whole new crop of emerging tools that help you get smarter about your competitors and markets?

Keep customers at the core of your research and analytics practices

It is key to create appetite for research and customer understanding within your business. Don’t be stuck in a never-ending rut of convincing your colleagues that research matters. Modernizing your customer research practices to improve customer experience is critical for great experience design. And this is not only true in a B2C context. Getting customer understanding right and predicting actions for your B2B customers matters, too. Review our new evaluation on B2B customer analytics tools.

Use comprehensive technologies to make sense of company data

You can’t get a full handle on all your enterprise data without smart data management and business intelligence (BI). Master data management (MDM) and BI technologies are all getting infused with innovative features and capabilities to help you apply insights to business outcomes in a faster and more effective way. Using the appropriate BI platforms and data management platforms can be vital in applying these insights.

Author: Srividya Sridharan

Source: Forrester