Businesses of all sizes have unprecedented access to data. In addition to their own stores of data from website and transaction activity, there is social media data, 3rd party data, open source data on markets, companies and people and many other sources. According to one Forbes article humanity generates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day. While many organizations recognize that there is value in this data harnessing and understanding it is where many organizations fall short. Here are a few areas where organizations can focus on optimizing data value for their organizations and over the next few months we will dive deeper into real-world examples and case studies.
Performance
I have great respect for the past. If you don't know where you've come from, you don't know where you're going. - Maya Angelou
Understanding the past helps to ground in organization on how they are performing in the present. Without the context of previous efforts it is impossible to understand how and organization has improved or worse how an organization has declined. What’s more dangerous is not understanding why and organization has been able to make those improvements or declines. Using data proactively not only allows you to benchmark against your previous efforts, it also allows you to understand where those improvements need to be made.
Understand the Market
Speaking of benchmarking, with the right data on your market you can also understand how you compare to your competition, where the market is heading and your organization’s position within the market. What does this mean for you? A broader understanding of your offerings and what resonates with your customer. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses in your market can help you understand where you may want to focus resources and efforts, where to pull back and what holes may exist in the marketplace that your organization can help to solve.
Making Smarter Decisions Faster
One of the great things about the way data is collected and organized today is that it is nearly instantaneous. If you are able to review that data more quickly, or better yet, employ advanced statistical techniques and AI to help review and act upon data instantly, you can improve performance on a personalized and moment to moment basis. Don’t get me wrong… this requires a lot of upfront planning, analysis and understanding as well as regular upkeep and management. Predicting sales trends, personalizing customer experience, analyzing top customers, improving marketing efforts, creating a better SaaS product, automating customer service, inventory management and so many other areas of your organization can be improved. The upside is worth it for large and small organizations alike.
Improving Process
We touched on this topic just a bit above. Data can be used to improve all sorts of processes. in selecting products it can be important to use data to choose what inventory is best suited for your market, how many of each item you need, at what price to sell them and which customers have the highest propensity to buy at any given time. It is important to understand when and what products can be used to upsell or down-sell customers. How often to email people and what time. What features are they using most often. What features are people using very little. How are people using your product. What will a specific customer want to buy next. There are so many questions data can help answer so that your team can make the most of their resources, optimizing your business for the best customer experience and increased revenue.
Over the next few months we will go over each of these ares in depth with real-world examples from business of all sizes. So, how does your organization use data?