The Age of Critics, Artificial Intelligence, and Listening to Your Customer

The adage "everyone's a critic" has never been more true than it is today. Long gone are the days of needing to rely solely on surveys to figure out how consumers feel about your product or business. Now -- whether it's through social media, online reviews, customer service emails, call centers or chat bots -- there is an overflow of customer feedback available for every type of business, content, or product out there. This is a problem technology helped to create, where we are asked to give everything a review, but thankfully, technology is now helping businesses sift through and understand all of that data floating around. According to a report last year by IDC, organizations that analyze all relevant data and deliver actionable information will achieve an extra $430 billion in productivity gains over their less analytically-oriented peers by 2020. Additionally, Forrester's Artificial Intelligence predictions for 2017 estimated that companies that are truly "insights-driven businesses" will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less-informed peers by 2020.