From Structured Data To "Data In The Wild"

With the new customer journey and the “feedback economy,” brands must deal with a new type of data that didn't exist before. If you're a customer experience (CX) practitioner, you want feedback from customers, and in the past, this has come from very structured information. Now it’s “data in the wild.” Feral facts, if you will. 

Over the years, as social media has blown up, and online reviews and user forums have become destinations, a whole new category of “data in the wild” has emerged. This data can be named or completely anonymous, but it's just out there without any control by brands. 

Changing Data. Changing Customers.

The concept of data in the wild reflects changes in how customers interact with brands now compared to ten or 20 years ago. It’s not just customers who’ve changed; consider how businesses have evolved, too. When the customer relationship management (CRM) system was introduced, you could figure out how to continually stay in contact with your customers. You relied on the data in those CRM systems to communicate with them. For example, this structured data let you send surveys to get feedback. It was good information to have, but the information was under your control. 

Now companies need to figure out how to capture, analyze and take action on unstructured data in reviews and social commentary in a way that's also consistent with how they handle structured data. If you understand what the structured data says, then you can validate it with the unstructured data. Then you use the insights to improve your business and ultimately create loyal advocates who continue to buy your products and recommend them to others. 

Data Wrangling: Impossible without Technology

The amount of data out there is mind-blowing, and it's nearly impossible to wrangle it into in any type of organized, meaningful fashion without technology. Think about a company that gets thousands of reviews a month. Trying to sort through those and understand what each customer is telling you and what overall customer sentiment looks like would be overwhelming if not impossible to do manually.

The volume of data in the wild is exponentially greater than the amount of structured data that exists today. In fact, 70% of the conversations that happen about businesses today are uncontrolled and take place "in the wild." But that doesn’t mean you can’t tap into it. Data is data, and with the right solutions, you can make it useful.