By Bridget Bidlack, SVP of Product, Lucid
The pandemic taught us that appropriately tracking, capturing, and analyzing customer data intelligence is paramount. Customer behaviors and attitudes are always shifting, and the businesses that are best positioned to understand, reach, and market toward those shifts are the ones that will succeed in scaling revenue.
With that, data procurement has traditionally been viewed as a managed service. Companies hire and rely on third-party data platforms and consulting services to do the tracking, capturing, and analyzing. But is that still the case?
There is this notion that data is evolving to become much less a managed service. Data is everywhere, and at everyone’s fingertips; it is no longer confined to the walls of a research firm or agency. But what does this evolution mean for companies and the data industry at large?
What is DIY Data?
We are at a fascinating, albeit unsettling, time in which workflow procedures have been forever disrupted, and already scarce budgets and resources feel that much more crunched. This brings us to this new concept of DIY data.
Chances are that your organization today benefits from a CRM system — whether that be a well-known platform like Salesforce or HubSpot, or something more homegrown. The bottom line is: most companies today understand the value behind customer interaction data and are doing whatever they can, by whatever means, to harness it. DIY data, by definition, is the idea that organizations can collect and leverage their own data and analyze it internally to help guide future business decisions.
Today, organizations not only have the data at their fingertips, but also understand that their in-house team is going to be the group of people closest to that data, and therefore the ones in the best position to decipher it correctly. They understand the ins and outs of the data accrued; they have an inkling of what it may mean based on their past project knowledge and projections for future company growth.
Not only that, but implementing in-house data collection and analysis is more cost-effective and time-efficient. Why bucket in additional time for briefings, analysis, and reporting with an outside party if there is bandwidth to do the same in house?
Does this mean market research firms will become obsolete?
Not exactly. They, too, are going through a disruptive period — one in which ResTech, or research technology, is now top of mind. Technology is modernizing traditional market research practices, and by leveraging automation software or other advanced tools to facilitate research, platforms, agencies, and brands are able to target, deliver, and analyze their insights initiatives more quickly.
Businesses can extract specific data to pinpoint shifting sentiments and capture how their target audience demographic is feeling at any given moment, something that has emerged as a critical need in recent months.
Both in-house teams and research partners benefit from embracing new approaches to getting the consumer insights they are after. Flexibility is greater as turnaround times and overall cost of projects improve without sacrificing accuracy and quality. The proliferation of DIY data and transformation of the market research industry is clearing the path for a future with greater access to valuable information for all.
Where does the future of data as a service lie?
Data is more readily available when accessed through software. Therefore, the future of data as a service relies on continued developments in technology — through software’s ability to “DIY” data and make it more readily available at a person’s, any person’s, fingertips.
With data being truly everywhere, change is on the horizon for nearly every industry. And, no matter how businesses ultimately harness and analyze data moving forward, they must remember to view data as their compass.
