Discover actionable strategies to leverage GenAI and AI tools for customer-centric growth. Learn how to assess your consumer intelligence maturity, reshape your data strategy, and upskill your team to achieve a sustainable competitive edge. Master the seven pillars that drive revenue, brand advocacy, and cost savings in today’s data-rich market.
Ready to future-proof your business? Dive deeper to learn how leading organizations are transforming customer insights into real results-and how you can implement these proven strategies to stay ahead of the competition.
Table of Contents
- Recommendation
- Take-Aways
- Summary
- Integrate the growing abundance of consumer data into your consumer intelligence strategy.
- Embrace seven consumer intelligence pillars to unlock the potential of GenAI and AI to improve customer centricity.
- Reshape your data strategy, operating model, and approach to talent to achieve a competitive advantage.
- About the Authors
Recommendation
Despite the explosion of available consumer data, many organizations fail to fully leverage data insights to boost customer centricity. Learn why it’s vital that companies leverage the potential of GenAI and AI tools, gaining insight into the strategic, operational, and culture shifts you’ll need to take to thrive amid the fast pace of change. Use Boston Consulting Group’s “Consumer Intelligence Maturity Matrix” (CIMM) to assess your stage of development when it comes to becoming truly customer-centric, and learn how to improve your data strategy, reshape your operating model, and upskill talent to unlock a competitive advantage.
Take-Aways
- Integrate the growing abundance of consumer data into your consumer intelligence strategy.
- Embrace seven consumer intelligence pillars to unlock the potential of GenAI and AI to improve customer centricity.
- Reshape your data strategy, operating model, and approach to talent to achieve a competitive advantage.
Summary
Integrate the growing abundance of consumer data into your consumer intelligence strategy.
At every Amazon meeting, Jeff Bezos placed an empty chair at the boardroom table to serve as a symbolic reminder that the customer had “a seat at the table.” When you cultivate a deep understanding of your customer, you improve both decision-making and your go-to-market and customer experience, while demonstrating increased responsiveness to shifts in customer preferences. In fact, consumer-centric companies — those that prioritize the needs of the customers — typically see a 10% to 20% revenue growth increase, a 20% to 40% boost in brand advocacy, and a 15% to 25% cost savings benefit. Today, there’s a massive increase in available consumer data, as customers engage with brands across multiple channels and platforms. Yet many companies are failing to fully leverage the potential of the GenAI and AI tools that could give them the insights needed to become truly customer-centric.
“The longstanding quest to create a better consumer intelligence engine has remained elusive to most organizations.”
Companies that build a better consumer intelligence strategy using AI and GenAI insights will see three key shifts: They’ll optimize task execution, saving time and money; they’ll democratize data and analysis, giving people more time to think strategically, reshaping decision-making; and they’ll develop a more holistic “360-degree” view of their customer. There are numerous obstacles companies face when trying to make the most of these new technologies, including organizational silos that inhibit collaboration, a failure to invest in upskilling workers, and the lack of a unified consumer strategy. If your company has yet to unlock the potential of GenAI and AI tools in delivering data insights, you have roughly three to five years to do so. Integrating a growing volume of touchpoints and customer data inputs into your intelligence strategy is required to thrive in today’s competitive global market.
Embrace seven consumer intelligence pillars to unlock the potential of GenAI and AI to improve customer centricity.
Best-in-class leaders should embrace the following “BCG consumer intelligence pillars”:
- “Consumer intelligence North Star” — Improve your strategic direction and decision-making to better serve and engage customers.
- “Consumer intelligence execution” — Use GenAI and AI tools to speed up intelligence-to-impact cycles, delivering higher-impact insights.
- “Consumer intelligence data and technology” — Develop a holistic view of your customer with an integrated data ecosystem.
- “Ways of working” — Work with small, multidisciplinary, and cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive go-to-market activation.
- “Talent” — Ensure your organization is adaptive by investing in the upskilling and cross-skilling of your talent.
- “Culture” — Create shared incentives, fostering collaboration and preventing silos, and connect KPIs throughout your organization to shared objectives.
- “Governance” — Mitigate the risks of new AI technologies with new risk management and governance processes.
Reshape your data strategy, operating model, and approach to talent to achieve a competitive advantage.
When endeavoring to incorporate GenAI and AI tools into your operations to improve customer centricity, consider which stage of maturity your company is at. Boston Consulting Group’s “Consumer Intelligence Maturity Matrix (CIMM)” identifies four maturity levels. In the lowest level, your insights team works in a silo and can only answer highly specified research questions. In the next level up, consumer data and intelligence support functional decision-making, serving “ as an input to siloed functions’ strategic decision-making processes.” Next, you start to leverage the potential of cross-touchpoint data insights into the organization’s business strategy. And in the final stage of maturity, you’re able to deliver a competitive advantage, as your organization has centralized consumer intelligence in a fully integrated, transparent manner.
“Today, few traditional consumer insights practitioners are upskilling talent quickly enough to keep pace with the speed of data and technology innovations.”
Strengthen consumer intelligence at your organization by focusing on the following three areas:
- Data — Create a “mission-focused data strategy” that identifies the highest priority data sources you’ll need to achieve your business goals.
- Operating model — Improve your operating model, creating faster feedback loops and working with “mission-oriented” cross-functional teams. Increase the influence of consumer intelligence in your organization, while establishing impact-driven incentives and building new governance and risk-management structures.
- Talent — Upskill your talent, augmenting strategic skill sets (for example, ensuring consumer researchers have the capacity to quickly analyze consumer data), deprioritizing outdated execution skills (for example, drafting surveys), and expanding risk-management skills to ensure workers can effectively harness the power of consumer intelligence.
About the Authors
Lara Koslow, Ben DeStein, Gaby Barrios, and Elisia de Smet are professionals with Boston Consulting Group.