The COVID-19 pandemic has had a massive impact
on human behavior across the globe. There has been no shortage of news reports
telling us how social distancing and lockdowns have changed the way we work, learn,
eat,
shop,
and entertain
ourselves. Digital channels have become an indelible part of our lives and how
we behave on them is more important than ever. While these changes have been
developing for years, there’s no denying the COVID-19 crisis delivered a huge
boost to digital activity, and many of the changes are here to stay.
So which corresponding changes do companies need
to make to thrive in this new world? They fall in two broad categories.
First, data-driven companies must now find
effective ways to harness this digital behavioral data to improve all aspects
of their business – from revenue forecasting, to inventory management, and
supply chain. Companies have invested huge amounts of resources in making
data-driven decisions. They’ve developed data strategies, built data governance
organizations, and staffed analytics and insights teams – but digital
behavioral data from websites, apps, and devices is conspicuously absent.
Unless your company is a digital titan, like Amazon, Netflix, Uber, or Spotify,
your digital behavioral data might be dumped in a data lake somewhere, but it
isn’t being used to drive important decisions across the business.
Second, consumer-facing brands must increase
their commitment to digital experiences. Their websites, apps, and devices are
now first-class citizens of the business – no longer afterthoughts. Many
companies have been pursuing these kinds of activities in the context of a
large-scale digital transformation project. After spending millions of dollars
over several years, however, these “cathedral-building” projects haven’t
delivered value, and they are being cut aggressively as firms lower their
expenses. Paradoxically, the driving need for these experiences is more
important than ever, so digital professionals need to identify more tactical
projects that can be deployed quickly and provide clear financial benefits.
In our conversations with our clients, their
most immediate priority is to cut costs. A few of the specific ideas we’ve
discussed for short-term initiatives are:
Forecast likely purchasing behavior by location for better sales forecasting and inventory management
Automate digital data flows that are currently being processed manually
Many of us are understandably consumed by the
crisis and can’t find the time to think beyond today. Others, however, aren’t
directly involved in the Corona response – freeing them to prepare their
organizations for a future where this permanent acceleration in the shift to
digital will affect their work, their teams, their families, and their lives.
The name of the game is Think Big, Start
Small. You don’t need a cathedral – you just need to get started with these
three steps:
Get a handle on your first-party
behavioral data; get it out of your data lake and into a place it can be more
useful and productive
Refocus your investments away from
cathedral-building projects and toward technologies which leverage digital
behavior to deliver near-term financial results
Use Machine Learning and Artificial
Intelligence to cut your labor cost to minimum
Mike is VP of Product Marketing at Syntasa (a Marketing AI Platform loved by Marketers, Data Scientists, and Data Engineers for its ability to unlock real value from their enterprise and clickstream data).
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