Digital Analytics: Modeling for Insights and New Methods

Firms are increasingly turning towards new-age technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the internet of things (IoT), blockchain, and drones, among others, to assist in interacting with their customers. Further, with the prominence of personalization and customer engagement as the go-to customer management strategies, it is essential for firms to understand how to integrate the new-age technologies into their existing practices seamlessly to aid in the generation of actionable insights. Towards this end, this study proposes an organizing framework to understand how firms can use digital analytics, within the changing technology landscape, to generate consumer insights. The proposed framework begins by recognizing the forces that are external to the firm that then leads to the generation of specific capabilities by the firm. Further, the firm capabilities can lead to the generation of insights for decision making that can be data-driven and/or analytics-driven. Finally, the proposed framework identifies the creation of value-based outcomes for firms and customers, resulting from the insights generated. Additionally, we identify moderators that influence (a) the impact of external forces on the development of firm capabilities, and (b) the creation of insights and subsequent firm outcomes. This study also identifies questions for future research that combines the inclusion of new-age technologies, generation of strategic insights, and the achievement of established firm outcomes.