Four Ways Your Analytics Journey Can Help You Respond Effectively to Pandemic Impacts on Customer Behaviors

We all thought, or at least hoped, that the COVID-19 pandemic would be history by now. Conditions are certainly better, but the end isn’t in sight. We still don’t know if COVID-19 will evolve into an endemic disease that we can more easily live with or if there’s a more deadly mutation just around the corner.

COVID-19 and its impact on consumers continues to ebb and flow regionally. Customer expectations and how they want to interact with businesses constantly evolve, with market dynamics influenced by the virus and its downstream economic and social impacts. For instance, during the pandemic, customers prioritized a safe shopping experience, often moving their shopping online, over saving money. But now, customers are once again trying to save money as consumer prices continue to rise due to pandemic-imposed supply chain shocks. They’re also increasing their visits to physical stores now that vaccines are available to help protect them from infection.

What Does This Mean for the Future of Data Analytics?

The pandemic has made navigating the right analytics journey essential to the survival and recovery of your business. Here are a few key examples:

Make Real-Time Decisions: In the “new normal” of pandemic-related health risks and restrictions, customer behaviors can change in real-time due to COVID-19 risks as well as supply chain impacts. Organizations thrive when they can use real-time analytics to monitor and react to changes as they occur in real-time. Those who cannot may struggle. A good customer journey depends on a good analytics journey. Organizations can attract and retain customers more effectively with relevant data available at the right time to see customer behavior changes and market impacts as they happen. It can also inform them of the next best actions in the moment.

Use Analytics in Digital Innovation: The International Data Corporation (IDC) says that enterprises now plan to spend more than half of their IT budgets on digital innovation because of the pandemic. Digital innovation intersects with analytics to optimize critical business processes such as buying processes, customer experiences, personalization and delivering new business models.

Predict Customer Behaviors: Your analytics journey ought to consider ways to accelerate Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve how you anticipate and understand customer needs and preferences of customers. Imagine being able to predict behaviors such as what customers want to buy, where they want to buy it, how much they are willing to pay, and the method they want to use for payment.

Make Your Supply Chain Resilient: Businesses need real-time analytics that will help them reinvent their supply chains to adjust to new realities quickly and efficiently. Analytics can give you visibility into demand volatility, supply shortages, inventory stock challenges, transportation bottlenecks, warehouse, and labor inefficiencies and more. This provides the transparency you will require for a fast-moving and optimized supply chain.

Move Your Analytics Journey Forward

Want to learn more about the future of analytics to build a better set of response tactics to pandemic impacts on customer behaviors? Download our new eBook, How to Maximize Business Value With Real-Time Data Analytics. You’ll learn what data analytics software capabilities you need to be successful alongside strategies to make your organization more data driven.

About Actian Corporation

Actian is helping businesses build a bridge to a data-defined future. We’re doing this by delivering scalable cloud technologies while protecting customers’ investments in existing platforms. Our patented technology has enabled us to maintain a 10-20X performance edge against competitors large and small in the mission-critical data management market. The most data-intensive enterprises in financial services, retail, telecommunications, media, healthcare and manufacturing trust Actian to solve their toughest data challenges.