New survey reveals nearly 70% of respondents are worried that global data regulations will make it difficult to gather and utilize data, but AI will help

Heap, the leading digital insights platform, today announced its 2023 “Data Decoded: The Heap Digital Insights Report” survey results. The survey reveals the two largest obstacles teams have with their data stacks – difficulty in consolidating and organizing data and needing too much time to extract meaningful insights from the data. However, 58% believe that AI can be useful in collecting the right data.

The report combined three data sources: a market survey of product teams, a survey of Heap customers, and aggregated, anonymized user data from the Heap platform.

The survey additionally revealed that nearly 70% of respondents worry that global data regulations will make it difficult to gather and utilize needed data. 86% of teams find themselves surrounded by data silos. Teams say their silos are created through cross-functional collaboration, the inability of tools to share data, and no culture or mandate for sharing data.

Additional findings from the survey include:

• 94% of respondents think teams could make more data-informed decisions.
• Last year 40% of teams added solutions and tools to their data stack.
• Over 60% of teams report having difficulty consolidating and organizing data across different tools.
• 37% share that it takes too much time to extract meaningful insights from data collected.
• 67% of respondents say it’s easier to understand what users are doing on their website compared to their mobile app or mobile web.

“The survey results show that successful organizations prioritize a data-driven culture to better understand their user’s cross-platform experience. It further reveals that teams want to make more data-informed decisions, and that many try to do a better job by adding various solutions to their data stack,” says Rachel Obstler, CPO at Heap. “However, despite the best intentions, they are now struggling to extract meaningful insights across various platforms and datasets. Looking ahead, 75% of respondents believe their daily work will be impacted by AI, and 31% think it will ‘somewhat’ change the way they analyze customer journeys.”

The obstacles and concerns outlined in the survey can be addressed with the proper data analytics platform. Heap provides users with real-time, accurate, and insightful digital insights to support improvements in digital experiences. Heap’s platform streamlines and organizes diverse datasets - including quantitative and qualitative data - into easily understandable and accessible insights with a holistic overview of users, journeys, experiences, and behaviors.