By: Peggy Crane, Director, Media & Entertainment, LTI

Digital is disrupting your business. Let’s face it, digital is disrupting your life. You can’t walk around without seeing people looking at their phones, Fitbits, and Apple Watches, talking about the latest show they binge-watched, or discussing their online shopping conquests. We now have access to more news and information than ever before, and faster each day.

To keep up with customer expectations, we need to focus on how customers are the ones benefitting from the investments we make in technology, including IoT (Internet of Things), RPA (Robotic Process Automation), Mobility, and more! Essentially, just as in your day-to-day life, your business is now just one of many competitors vying for your customers’ attention. Because your customers’ options are so limitless, they are demanding, with their attention and their wallets, more personalized products and experiences. It’s up to us (businesses) to meet their demands.

There are many tools to help companies on their digital journey. Two tools, Design Thinking and Analytics, are key to enabling the digital process and achieving success. Both tools will help personalize your offerings and can help guide your company in creating solutions that meet customers’ usability needs, as well as increase customer adoption, and satisfaction.

Design Thinking makes user experiences, opinions, and lifestyles central to the design process. Predicting what customers will do, what features they perceive as more relevant or necessary, where they are going to consume your products, and who they are going to share your products with, will help you build the right solution. By keeping a keen focus on user empathy and adding other analysis from search queries, social media, user behavior, and so on, you can learn how and when to engage your customers for maximum results.

To achieve more meaningful personalization, and, hence, better user experiences, applying data analytics and decision science is critical. Analytics can support your investments by measuring marketing initiatives, improving deployment and adoption strategies, and updating the customers’ preferences and attitudes. Digital and marketing analytics can gather data about customer usage, loyalty, pricing, and social media to help companies make better decisions, reach larger audiences, improve branding, and enhance user experience.

Design Thinking and Analytics can enable companies to predict customer needs before they arise. I believe these tools will help you achieve what is, ultimately, the most important goal when trying to cut through the vast digital marketplace: creating great user experiences.