According to a recent New Vantage Partners study, many large firms are still lagging behind and not making the most out of the 3 sources of actionable data for the benefit of their company. However, everyone is gargling Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in recent years; amazing, no?
Even more, according to another Forrester study, 73% of enterprise data is not used!
The good news is that all companies can still do well with the implementation of a Data Strategy. Especially since the main obstacle to implementing such a Data Strategy is the “People”, according to New Vantage Partners.
Towards a data-driven enterprise culture
Indeed, the same study reveals that for nearly 50% of companies, Personnel is the main source of resistance to change towards a data-driven enterprise culture.
It should also be noted that 60% of the companies surveyed took steps to develop and implement advanced analytics technologies to help them make better decisions and improve customer service.
However, the survey reveals that the vast majority of companies still have not yet adopted a corporate data strategy (see next post) that is clear in terms of objectives (expected benefits), investments and timelines.
Benefits of Enterprise Data Exploitation
Highlighting your business data will help you identify and capitalize on your most profitable activities and processes. Several companies are also investing in Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in order to distance or differentiate themselves from the competition. It’s not enough to dive head-first into Big Data and AI to take advantage of your business data; you still need to have defined a Data Strategy with clear objectives. The following are the key objectives and benefits of using data highlighted in the New Vantage Partners survey:
- Improved Decision Making 36%
- Customer Service Improvement 23%
- Reduction of Expenditures 13%
- Innovation & Disruption 11%
- Acceleration to the market / Launch of new products 9%
Three sources of data useful to your business
To create a competitive advantage, improve the level of conversion and customer retention, or break standards through analysis, we must first find good sources of data, draw on the data that can be used, and then take advantage of the opportunities they offer.
Analyzing these three main sources of data within your organization will allow you to:
OPERATE A BENEFICIAL FINANCIAL TRANSFORMATION
- Finance
The analysis of financial, transactional and accounting processes can greatly enlighten you on the conditions of success for your company. It is possible to highlight through business data a correlation between processes or to identify a chain of processes that lead to a profitable transaction.
Likewise, you might identify conditions and causes or processes that are not performing that slow down or stop a chain of operations leading to a successful transaction.
This could help you create new value for the company and make a strategic contribution in terms of profitability and process efficiency. Eliminating or optimizing inefficient processes is just as profitable as identifying the conditions for success of a financial transaction. Your ERP and your accounting system will be your primary sources of data in this case.
FIND YOUR COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE, ENHANCE CONVERSION RATES
- Sales
Survey your customers to increase the targeting effectiveness of your messages and create an improved customer experience; this should be an ongoing process in business today.
CRM is a good source of basic data for highlighting the most profitable marketing activities chain. Similarly, calls and emails from call centers, messages from chats and email robots, messages and comments from Social Media, Technical Support and Customer Service.
The fundamental objective is to identify the level of adequacy of your offer but also of your communications along the customer journey towards the purchase. You will want to identify your competitive advantages but also correct your shortcomings and deficiencies; for example, when or on what message or offer do your customers drop out of their purchase process.
PRODUCT INNOVATION & LOSS REDUCTION
- Production
Analyze customer service and technical support calls, conduct customer satisfaction surveys. The goal is to identify patterns of perception and appreciation regarding your products and services.
Better still, what is the central value or added value of your product that is so unanimous among customers that you always win the bet against competitors?
The objective is to identify the safest, most requested and most profitable products but also to find ways to improve your products and services or to identify qualities on which to orient the development of new products.
On a completely different level, the quality control data of the production line is also a gold mine for companies. Areas of investigation to explore are the downtime of production lines and the “gaps” between production stages, which significantly affect productivity and profitability. For example, if companies used their data to understand downtime, they could optimally plan the production line and greatly increase their productivity.
To be able to locate and predict anomalies that lead to shutdowns of the production line and adapt maintenance operations accordingly, in particular using data from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT); that is an ideal scenario of actionable data of the production line.
Conclusion
In general, the data can be drawn from three main functions of companies: Finance, Sales and Production. The data of these functions according to the type of company do not all have the same value and one must study the relevance and the cost of data recovery prior to making them “speak” to make sure that what they’ll tell will have value for the company.
At a minimum, every business should ask themselves the following question: “Do we have data that is easy to recover and whose business intelligence would be of great value? “
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