By Tom Ryan
With countless digital consumer conversations increasingly swaying opinions across the world, the most successful companies will be those that "merge traditional and digital consumer data and integrate them into their everyday operations." That's the conclusion of a report by PricewaterhouseCoopers, How consumer conversation will transform business.
Digital consumer conversations are defined as the billions of blogs, chats, emails, phone calls, text messaging, and social networks where consumers are talking about products, services and companies. The consulting firm said these "real-time, unfiltered attitudes, behaviors, and intentions" are transforming consumer behavior.
"This is already occurring in the advertising market, where consumer conversations are starting to change the foundation of pricing and performance evaluation," said Deborah Bothun, PwC principal and Advisory entertainment, media and communications leader, in a statement. "Knowledge of the consumer gained from digital conversations not only enables advertisers to better target their audience, but it is also driving improved digital media measurement systems."
However, the report also found that although executives recognize the potential of digital consumer conversations, they still have difficulty interpreting and reacting to them.
Of the 118 senior executives at U.S. multinationals who were surveyed in the recent PwC Management Barometer, 65 percent said they would increase their overall investment in knowing the customer in the next two years. Only about half said their companies regularly and systematically use blogs, wikis, social networking, and chat rooms to understand key influencers of market or consumer expectations.
PwC offered four ways companies can integrate consumer voices into standard operations:
1) Ask the big questions - The questions will be different for each company, but the theme is clear: where would a view of consumer behavior and sentiment that is closer, faster, cross-channel, and forward-looking impact your business most positively?
2) Pursue the best opportunities - In order to operationalize knowledge gained from consumer voices, companies should find consumer conversations that will solve specific problems and deliver value. Areas like new product launches, competitive threats and events that negatively impact reputation are a start.
3) Create a consumer intelligence unit and break down silos - The insight from consumer conversation may be applied to many functions, including driving corporate strategy, so that a company can react to early warnings of adverse issues gained through monitoring digital conversations quickly enough to lessen their impacts.
4) Improve operations according to real-time insight - The most highly evolved companies will merge consumer voices with other channels of consumer information in order to produce a granular, forward-looking, real-time and unfiltered view of their customers. The benefits of this process will be speed, agility, focus and prescience.
Discussion Question: Do you also find that executives are having "difficulty interpreting and reacting" to the opportunity around digital conversations? How do you think companies should approach exploring the value behind digital conversations?