#IIeX Focus Series – Technology & Market Research (4 of 5): Data and Analysis

 

Editor’s Note: Inspired by the IIEX Europe conference in Amsterdam, Phil Rance examines where market research is in technology adoption. Today: Data & Analysis. And here are Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

As increasing areas of customer activity become digital more and more data about customer behavior is being generated and stored. This applies as much to government and public services as it does to the private sector,  with HMRC, NHS and local authority service provision moving online. The availability of this “behavioral” data offers opportunities for analysis to understand existing customers and citizens better, and more importantly to enrich the understanding we have of consumers based on traditional market research. We find that combining these different data sources into our overall approach and analysis (eg. segmentations) leads to different, more robust and more actionable results than using in isolation.

As for “Big Data” – that’s so 2012, darling. Everyone spent 2013 trying to find different names for it. Let’s just call it “data”, and be done with it.

Reporting and analysis: putting the insights in the hands of the business

Using cloud computing platforms it is now easy to distribute sophisticated, granular, personalized real-time data throughout organizations at low marginal cost. This sounds grand and complicated, but platforms such as Salesforce.com for CRM data and Medallia for customer satisfaction data make it fairly easy. They allow information to be reported in near real-time, and to be configured to how it needs to be used throughout an organization. This is true of financial, sales and marketing information (eg. CRM systems) and is increasingly also true of market research information. It is particularly commonly used where there are operational applications for the research, eg. for customer satisfaction surveys. Again, this trend is being accelerated by the uptake of mobile data, with dashboards also being made available through mobile devices as apps, to allow quick and easy updates on key information.

Buzzword bingo: gamification, neuroscience, communities…

I don’t mean to be dismissive. There are many other innovations which have great potential for market research. For the purposes of this piece though, I’m looking at technology which goes right to the heart of everything that research is about, and has the potential to disrupt the whole industry. To me, gamification, neuroscience and communities, represent interesting enhancements to or subsegments of bigger technology trends, but I don’t see them changing the industry as a whole. I’m happy to be proved wrong though. And I think I might be wrong about neuroscience at least…

NEXT: multichannel research