Abstracts
Go for ‘Active Listening’ with your Customers – Harnessing the Power of Social Media & Big Data in Product Life Cycle
B Vijaya Kumar, Domain Consultant, New Product Introduction Practice,
vijayakumar.b1@tcs.com
Abhisek Goswami, Manufacturing Industry Solution Unit, Tata Consultancy Services,
abhisek.goswami@tcs.com
‘Active Listening’ is defined as the process of designing, deploying and practicing 360o engagement with the potential customers. This can enable the decision makers to take key decisions across the Product Life Cycle and will help to bridge the gap between what firm delivers as value and what customers want. Active Listening can create competitive advantage to your firm – it can be challenging, but certainly possible!
How can companies reduce the time to market of the new products? How can companies deliver the value to the customers that they look for? How can companies create new market segments? Organisations can discover the right answers to all these questions, if they start with ‘Right Customer needs’. Different studies assign the failure of the new product launches to market research at first instance.
Big Data1 and Social media can be used to solve some of the perennial problems in the new product development –i.e.., understanding the dynamic needs of the customer. A recent statistics reveal that there are more than 1.5 billion social media users across the globe and among them 80% regularly interact with the social networks. Properly designed data relationship model supported by market listening solution would perform predictive analysis by converting fairly unstructured data and sentiments into desired value proposition for customers with fair amount of accuracy.
‘Active Listening’ will help the organizations to tailor the product features suited to their customers, perform frugal Engineering , identify the new markets and even collaborate with the customers to create a product or service. The scope of the paper covers the following - need for Social media and big data, approach to manage them in new product development to facilitate Active Listening and benefits to the organizations. Challenges in the adoption of the Social media and Big Data are also discussed.
About Authors
Authors have consulting experience with large global base of customers, and have to their credits engagements in areas of Visioning, Definition and Complex Program Management. The Authors are practicing consultants working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) which is an IT services, consulting and business solutions organization that delivers real results to global business, ensuring a level of certainty no other firm can match.
1Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making, according to Gartner.
