Boston Consulting Group: “Overcoming the Innovation Readiness Gap”
CEOs at the most innovative companies prioritize strategies and systems that elevate the role of customer insight in planning and operations.
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has identified elevating customer insight as one of “five recurring topics that CEOs wrestle with as they work to embed innovation in their companies’ DNA and to scale up this critical capability.”
In a report published earlier this year, “Overcoming the Innovation Readiness Gap”, BCG posed the question CEOs must answer this way: “Do we have deep customer insight, and do we translate it into a future-ready innovation strategy?”
BCG’s research indicates that “some 80% of consumer-facing companies use only the most basic customer insight tools. Although many companies invest significantly in conducting consumer research or tracking consumers’ behavior over time, they may lack the capacity to move from data to insights and then to action.”
According to BCG, the keys to success are “the customer insight function must have effective tools … [and] requires elevation to the status of a true strategic insight partner on innovation.”
The first of these priorities is squarely in Northern Light’s wheelhouse. Northern Light SinglePoint™ is an ideal tool for large organizations (both B2C and B2B) seeking to make customer insights readily accessible and “minable” for strategic insights to inform critical business decisions.
With SinglePoint, relevant information from all sources — internal and external, field generated and from syndicated sources — is readily accessible to every employee. All the market research and competitive intelligence that lives in reports and other documents across the enterprise is fully integrated and searchable in one place, with search results returned in under one second. And SinglePoint’s embedded artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, which summarize and synthesize the main points of key documents and direct users to other relevant content based on their interests, accelerate time-to-insight for all users of the system, driving better and more timely business decisions.
These AI-driven capabilities are vital to addressing one of the shortcomings BCG observes in many customer insights operations: “Too often today, the primary role that customer insight plays is that of input provider.” Rather than input, AI enables automated delivery of meaningful insights to business decision-makers. That difference – between input and insight – is significant, and elevates the value of the customer insights function tremendously. We’re talking here about the difference between searching your organization’s market research content collection for information about, say, a particular product category and getting back a long list of document titles, versus getting back an automatically generated, pithy summary report (thank you, machine learning!) that presents highlights of the major points contained in all those relevant documents on the search results list. Which response would be more efficient for a marketing professional attempting to formulate a recommendation? And what about having relevant insights proactively pushed to decision-makers based on their specific role within the organization and their unique interests, rather than having to search at all – in other words, having important and timely information find you, instead of you having to find it?
As more organizations seek to elevate the value of customer insight in their strategy and planning, as BCG recommends, it is critical that they equip themselves with knowledge management systems to support that initiative. Northern Light SinglePoint can be a major asset in extracting maximum value across the enterprise from a focused customer insight operation.
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* BCG’s report is one of thousands of thought-provoking pieces contained in Northern Light’s Thought Leaders Content Collection, available to SinglePoint subscribers directly from Northern Light, and to individuals and companies through Amazon’s AWS Marketplace and the Amazon Data Exchange.