Recently I was in the market for car insurance. My options boiled down to between Company A and Company B. A was an established car insurance player with over five decades of experiences, a catchy jingle and mascot and a prominent advertiser. Company A’s website had me filling out over a dozen forms and documents that needed both email and physical copies to be resent. Company B was the new player on the block. Armed with knowledge of my car model and critical details, I was done with paperwork and shaking hands digitally within 18 minutes.

We are living in a digital era where response times determine company growth and sharpen competitive edge. Multiple factors determine customer experience. With more and more players entering the market, your customer is seeking out the best possible experience and solution.

Data is the new Oil
Treating data as the new oil is the mantra of the Facebooks and the Ubers in our world. As companies strive for further agility, automation becomes more and more pervasive. While automation has its benefits, companies can find themselves becoming over-reliant on unrealistic expectations from their automation investments.

“So how does one stay competitive in such a ‘non-competitive’ world?”

The most competitive and agile companies are using Analytics to present data sets to help make the right decisions and drive customers to conclude.

Analytics is the fuel behind one of my favorite uses of data – Amazon Go. Thanks to data analysis they were able to pinpoint their customers’ need for seamless brand experiences for tiresome tasks like banking and grocery shopping.

Amazon Go is far from your average supermarket where customers can experience a cashier-free grocery experience allowing items to be picked up and walked out of minus queuing or paying (of sorts). Each customer’s smartphone is scanned when they enter, and Amazon’s patented ‘walk out’ technology detects what is taken and bills their Prime account.

While the one-off automated grocery store or bank branch won’t cause a significant change in your customer’s emotional states if your business continues to rely on a broader scale automated systems deployment, satisfaction with your brand will take a hit.

Advanced Analytics – Showing us where value is
Recently, one of the Netherlands’s largest logistics company began transforming into an Insight Driven company. The business would be supported by high-quality Advanced Analytics solutions. They would also be increasing the analytics maturity of the entire company.

Just imagine - an Analytics consultancy team within their organization with the capability to grow analytical awareness of each employee.

Data science has a slightly different focus – pulling out insights that humans usually oversee. Its basis could be data, but the output is often a Machine Learning model rather than a report. Customer profitability is predicted, the next best offer is determined, and fraud is recognized.

This is all being made possible with data insights. It, however, is only possible once automation is given minimal importance. Analytics helps answer questions like ‘do we have the right people, in the right place at the right time performing the right action?’ or ‘Has a clear line of sight from decisions to data sources with data management been created to support this process?’

The Empathy Economy
A recent McKinsey Global Institute report stated nearly half of all activities people were being paid to do globally could potentially be automated with existed tech. Not taking anything away from working people, empathy is a lot more valuable in an increasingly automated universe.

Think about it – if your automated business possesses less-than-stellar customer experiences, you have a tremendous opportunity to invest in empathy from the Empathy marketplace.

In hindsight, it all boils down to you. Where do you see your company and who do you perceive to be competitors? As more and more players enter your industry, making sense of your data to retrieve the value and distinguish yourself from the competition is the best way to leverage Analytics. Analytical insights are critical to keeping your business agile and fluid in the face of an evolving industry. Automation guarantees processes and smooth delivery, but this only takes you so far in the front of customer experience and giving the customer just the right insurance.