How can companies use machine learning to efficiently understand the needs and wants of their customers, without sacrificing the insights that come from employees’ intuition and empathy?
Understanding Customers by Blending Human Insight and Machine Learning
Businesses naturally focus on what’s easily measured in their efforts to evaluate and improve performance and customer experience. That bias is amplified in traditional market research, where people are typically asked closed-ended voting and rating-scale questions that yield responses which are easily quantifiable and repeatable. But often the greatest insight is found in spontaneous conversation with customers—not in the online survey that shoppers are asked to complete, but in the photos they take, the tweets they post, and the advice they offer in online forums. So instead of forcing people into the role of “respondent” and limiting their input only to the answers to questions we’ve thought to ask, we encourage our community members to share in multiple ways, knowing that machine learning will make us more efficient in interpreting many forms of organic, unstructured human expression.