The Power of Predictive Guidance: Why We Need Intelligent Experiences at Work

How often do you see this scene play out: it’s evening, someone glances at their wrist, and sighs. Sure they might be late for something, but these days, more often it’s their fitness app reminding them that they owe another 2500 steps. 

If only it were so easy to turn business data into action. Then again, why isn’t it that easy? As consumers we have access to remarkable, data-driven apps – Health, Uber, Doordash, and a thousand others – all wonderfully efficient at converting data into action – a run, a ride, dinner on the table.

The power of these consumer apps is that although they are all driven by data, from the user’s perspective, they are not data apps; they’re catalysts for action. They are digital experiences. Using data to shape winning behavior and positive outcomes is similarly the objective when businesses collect and analyze data. What if we use the principles that enable intelligent user experiences for consumers to drive business outcomes? 

While consumers have many helpful, intelligent experiences at their fingertips, at work they have analytics applications and dashboards. Dashboards are good for bringing data to the business user and enabling them to make sense of what happened and why. But dashboards also present challenges.

One such challenge is that the user is left to turn any dashboard revelations into actions. Most of us can only effectively focus on one dimension, or one business process, at a time. This puts business users in a difficult position at the moment of decision-making. Another is that the typical dashboard is a window into a business process, but it is not woven into the fabric of the business process. This forces users into context switching, derailing forward progress. To be effective, they need a continuous experience, from insight to outcome.  

Intelligent experiences provide the bridge across the gap between rich data and actionable insights, connecting users to desired outcomes. The hard-won lessons from consumer app development offer a framework for enabling business users to apply data and drive desirable business outcomes.  

If we tease apart an intelligent experience, it has four characteristics:

• Instead of digging for data, important insights come to the user
• Insights make sense within a coherent process the user is already embedded in
• Data is easily consumed, contextualized in a narrative that is intuitive and not just numbers and charts
• The user can fully understand the information presented and take the optimal action 

Equipped with this knowledge, it becomes easy to imagine how we might implement an intelligent experience to support a business process such as sales or service. The goal is to provide the end user sales with a digital experience that reveals what has happened (the pipeline has fallen) and what will happen (if I call this customer with that offer, we’re likely to close the deal).

In an intelligent sales experience, there would be a notification that something important happened, in this case, that the Q3 pipeline has dropped. Think of this as the buzz of your health app that gets your attention. Turning to the dashboard we can see what happened, such as the downward trend in the rate of close for a certain category of customers. This is the equivalent of your health app notifying you that you are short on your steps. Predictive analytics automatically turns revelations into a defined set of suggested, ranked best actions to choose from and apply, just like your health app suggests activities. This is precisely what groups like sales, marketing and services need: clear suggestions to act on, right now.

Success, whether in business or health, is easiest when we have clear options and a path to take action. All the understanding in the world doesn’t help if it can’t be converted into next steps. Combining dashboards for exploration and reflection with intelligent apps that convert insights into action is a powerful direction for a healthier bottom line.