The time of year has finally arrived when the sun lingers on the horizon longer and longer, life creeps back into the trees, and weather forecasts look much more favorable. But this normally welcome period of seasonal change coincides with unprecedented change in how we are forced to conduct business. In the midst of the global pandemic, businesses must connect with their customers in novel ways and find smarter and more efficient methods of using their data.

In this month’s Insights Beat, we feature some of these new ways to manage, analyze, and monetize your data. In particular, data commercialization efforts become even more important, as companies will continue to look for new revenue sources.

Make Customer Analytics A Perennial, Not A Seasonal

As the ongoing pandemic disrupts businesses, now is the time to continue to invest in cutting-edge customer analytics technologies to increase lifetime value, increase customer loyalty and retention, and bolster the customer experience. This means pivoting customer analytics practices in the short term but also adopting customer analytics technologies to position your company to come through this period of change in the longer term.

Grow A Broader Community Of Users With AutoML

A burgeoning automated machine learning (AutoML) market is helping companies expand the use of machine learning beyond data scientists to a broader community of business users. AutoML promises to make data scientists more productive, embed AI capabilities into applications, and help discover new business insights faster. AutoML will continue to automate many parts of the machine-learning process, and companies will look for efficiencies as they tightly channel the use of ML to be laser-focused on business needs.

Plant The Right Data Architecture Seeds

This is also a good time to take a discerning look at your data architecture and decide if you could benefit from a data virtualization or data fabric approach or both. In our new research, we compare and contrast these approaches to unlock the most value from your data.

Follow this monthly blog series to keep up with the latest business insights, data strategy, and analytics research and thought leadership.

 

Note: A Forrester subscription is required to access the research featured and linked to in this post.

(Daniel Weber, research associate, coauthored this post.)