Customer Insight in 2015 & your predictions for 2016

Now 2015 is nearly over, it seems like a good time to reflect on this year.

To help you, I’ve curated a few insight-related “best of…” lists for your delectation. A great number of this sort of list are published on social media around this time of year. Just a few struck me as particularly useful. So, here is a mixture of those looking back and those predicting trends for 2016:

My choice of 2015 review lists…

To start us off, in a season where people find more time for reading, Farnham Street have published a helpful list of 2015 best reads in the field of Behavioural Psychology. Some interesting books there, especially for research leaders or others wanting to ponder more philosophically on human behaviour. Plus, they’ve included some of their best articles of the year. Well worth a read, with titles like “the reasons we work” and “how to think“:

The Best of Farnam Street 2015

As the year heads toward an end, what better way to reflect than to look back on the pieces that moved you. Find below the 15 most read and shared articles published on Farnam Street in 2015, spanning everything from philosophy and psychology to mental models and understanding.

The data resource treasure chest that is the Data Elixir blog have also published their 2015 round-up. Highlights include reflections of Robert Chang, a data scientist at Twitter, on “doing data science“. Plus, treats including “Top 10 data mining algorithms in plain English” & “The only probability cheatsheet you’ll ever need“. They’ve also included a link that I’ve published previously, to the fantastic collection of data visualisation resources shared at datavisualization.ch:

Data Science News | Data Elixir

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Looking forwards to 2016…

Firstly, Tempkin Group have published a post on 11 Customer Experience trends for 2016. In summary, they have entitled 2016 the “year of emotion”, to signify how much more focus there will be on emotion in designing customer experiences. Their research shows, not surprisingly, that emotion has the most impact on loyalty and is the dimension of experiences where most companies are weakest. A couple of their other trends, “empathy training” & “culture change intensifying”, also point to focussing on employee emotional engagement. Well worth reviewing as a list, especially as almost all these CX trends will require relevant & impactful customer insights to work:

11 Customer Experience Trends for 2016 | XM Institute

In the upcoming year, CX will continue to grow in importance for companies and an even larger number of organizations will begin their CX journeys. In this environment, we expect to see: Peter Drucker once said, ” Culture eats strategy for lunch.” We agree and believe that customer experience is a reflection an organization’s culture and operating processes.

Lastly, I have got to highlight the 2016 predictions published by Database Marketing magazine. A host of industry notables (flatteringly including yours truly) have included their views on data trends and what it means to database marketing practice in 2016. Reading over them, I think my predictions are contrarian, especially regarding the coming disillusionment with data scientists. It will be interesting to see if the swing back to qualitative ‘humanising’ of marketing and more holistic insight proves to be right:

Database Marketing – December 2015

DECEMBER 2015 | WWW.DBM.TO DAY PUTTING INSIGHT AT THE HEART OF MARKETING TURBO ANALYTICS COPING WITH MEGA VOLUMES OF DATA NICOLA ASKHAM WHAT DOES DATA GOVERNANCE REALLY MEAN? LEARNING FROM EX-OFFENDERS WHO’LL BE MAKING THE BIG MOVES IN 2016?

Hope those lists were helpful. What was your best of 2015? How do you think our profession will develop in 2016?

Whatever your view, I hope you have a Happy New Year and look forward to sharing more in 2016.