03/26/2018

How to Understand Your Customers Without Asking a Single Question

Crowd-sourcing is outdated - the cool companies are on to crowd-learning

In the past 24 hours, you've passively shed more data than you can possibly imagine. Tiny fragments of the physical and virtual you are strewn across all the places you've been: the unique keystroke patterns entered as you've typed on your computer; the subtle intonations in your recorded call to customer service; the biomatter you've left behind in cars and public bathrooms. On their own, these bits of you aren't particularly useful. But collected with everyone else's data, then mined and refined with powerful artificial intelligence systems, your passive data can be used to tell the story of your future.

By now, you're no doubt familiar with crowd-sourcing: asking the public to contribute their ideas to help you solve problems or to weigh in on decisions. But what if you could harness the wisdom of the crowd without asking them any questions? What if you could hold an intensive focus group--or an exhaustive store walk-through--at scale, and without the usual cadre of customers and pricey influencers and experts?

Researchers now know that making such observations from our passive data can be much more informative than interacting with us directly. This is "crowd-learning:" using the vast volumes of data we shed or are otherwise available (our online activity, our locations, the bio-data in state and federal health records) to learn or understand something new.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Inc.