Your valuable and curated customer data. Throw it away and start again.

Coronavirus has taken too many lives, decimated global economies, removed the sense of place for all communities and reshaped almost all propositions in all corners of the world.

The way our world works from a social, economic, personal space and geographic perspective is now on hyper change. Simply it is the most significant upheaval that diverse and dispersed communities and individuals will hopefully experience.

Consumer behaviour is fundamentally changed. Employee behaviour has changed radically. How we view our health, government, even the neighbourhood store is not the same as it was. This means that what as individuals what we knew about the past, is no longer relevant for the future. And what we know about our history, isn’t going to help us with the future.

For enterprises, this creates a massive and frankly unprecedented problem. All the customer data that an enterprise or agency has gathered, optimised, curated and analysed in February 2020, or February 2000 now needs to be thrown out the window, and if you can be honest, has zero value.

Simple everyday processes that we have taken for granted have now changed, and the change is one-directional. I have elderly parents who were last year fitted with hearing aids. For them, this involved a trip to the audiologist to have a test done, the hearing aids fitted and optimised for their use. However, in a post Covid_19 world, I caught up with an audiology provider who was reeling at the changes to their everyday business.

The shift to no-touch, enabling one to purchase and use the hearing aid without close physical contact. Thereby no need for a large visible retail space, or a big team of face to face enablement and customer service staff. What they hew about their customers hearing hasn’t changed, but everything else has. (To be fair, six months of isolation may lead to situational deafness rising exponentially)

From an employee perspective, the way we work has changed. The transition to working from home was made in a day for millions of employees the globe over. What is possible, and what is required, how to communicate, evaluate and nurture employees all changed. What worked last year won’t work this year, so the data has to change.

Therefore what you knew is now what you need to know.

The good news is that while your data is out of date if you had a deep understanding of your data collection processes, analytics and how to make actionable outcomes you are in the fast lane for recovery from Covid_19 from a business perspective. If your processes are immature, beholden to organisational shortcomings or CFO budget constraints, then you are not going to recover.

Capture Point

It is hard to accept that your old data now has no value. Those with the best data management processes are the ones that will accelerate first in recovery. Every step you take to improve the data management processes now, and urgently will help you understand the new customer values.