Technology group Oracle believes that people’s\u00a0online behavior information, or\u00a0digital body language, will play a crucial role in reshaping applications in 2014 and beyond.<\/p>\n
Financial service firm PwC interviewed Steven Woods of Oracle\u00a0as\u00a0part\u00a0of a technology forecast.<\/p>\n
According to Woods, a key trend that is shaping the future of applications is digital body language.<\/p>\n
He noted that with information flows in buying and selling, they were very different before the Internet compared with the way they are today.<\/p>\n
“Before the digital era, information was a fairly rare commodity. To learn about a vendor, you had to interact with the vendor via a series of conversations.”<\/p>\n
“With that interaction, a professional salesperson had the opportunity to understand buyers and their interests through their body language and their reactions and so on,” Woods\u00a0said.<\/p>\n
Fast-forward to today, “and the information flows are fascinatingly different. The buyers have complete control over where they get their information; they search, read reviews, and compare specifications and opinions.”<\/p>\n
“The digital channels disintermediate the conversation that sales was able to have. Salespeople can no longer read a buyer\u2019s body language and understand their interests,” Woods, the\u00a0vice president of software development at Oracle, said.<\/p>\n
He stressed that salespeople still need to get the insights that they used to get. “That is where the concept of digital body language comes in.”<\/p>\n
“A marketer should use online behavior information to understand the hot buttons and interest levels of every potential buyer and put together a view of that buyer\u2019s digital body language.”<\/p>\n
He said that organisations that pieceed together that view of a customer based on the aggregate of their digital behavior and then use that information in all aspects of their organisation, would be successful.<\/p>\n