Mining Mountains Of Data: Why Data Is Important For Business

Successful business leaders have always depended on some kind of data to guide their decision making. Businesses in a myriad of industries have historically collected data from their customers using manual methods such as phone, mail, and face-to-face conversations in order to understand them better.

Due to the cost of resources and cumbersome nature of this manual data collection, most companies worked with limited data and some didn’t even bother with it at all.

Today, technology has made gathering data much easier and more automated – so much so that the new challenge is filtering all the data collected and deciding which of it is most useful. Just about every business platform or tool available on the market today can produce mountains of data for your business to use – the questions is: which mountain should you climb?

Here are the top three ways businesses can take advantage of data:

Make Better Decisions

Business leaders rely on various factors to make their decisions – sometimes it’s their gut, sometimes it’s the news, sometimes they are influenced by their competitors, and sometimes by their investors. All of these factors are indeed important for business leaders to consider when making decisions, but the most important is cold, hard numbers on what is actually going on within the business.

Data guides leaders to make smarter decisions when it comes to pivotal business decisions by providing an accurate representation of the key factors they need to consider instead of relying on hunches, guesswork and others’ biases. For example, the last marketing campaign’s conversion rate can help determine what the next campaign should be, real-time customer feedback can help to determine when to recall a product and social media analytics can help to identify new trends and what R&D to pursue.

Tracking Business Performance

Every business suffers a slow sales month from time to time, and every company has had a marketing campaign that performed poorly. The important thing is to make sure these failures don’t become recurring events, producing a pattern of decline that ends up in total business collapse.

Data is the key to understanding what went wrong and what went right – without it, the business is simply relying on guess work and sheer luck, which is not sustainable. There are various business intelligence tools on the market today that can be used to track business performance, these include: Zoho Reports, Sisense, Domo, Salesforce, SAP Analytics Cloud, Chartio and Microsoft Power BI.

Tracking and interpreting data from the various business processes helps you pinpoint where things went wrong and figure out which parts of which process need to be improved, or even eliminated, and which are doing well and should be expanded upon.

Understand Customers Better

The clearer you see your consumers, the easier it is to reach them and convince them to buy your products/services. Data is key to understanding your customers and the market as whole. It helps you improve your customer service by guiding you to find the real answers to vital questions such as:

• Who are your actual customers?
• Which of your marketing channels and campaigns appeal best to your customers?
• What do your target customers take into consideration when choosing a product/service?
• How much do you need to spend to attract a new customer or retain an existing one?

Data such as web traffic, social media engagement, user experience, buying behavior, physical address, Net Promoter Score, churn rate, purchase decision hierarchy and how they discovered the business can all be gathered and leveraged to understand customers better and improve the company.

Don’t Run Away from Data, Embrace It!

Today, running a business with the help of data is no longer an option but rather the new norm – the bare minimum. If your business is not being guided by data, it will likely fail. It’s tempting to think that data should be a concern only for medium to large businesses, but the truth is that even a startup generates enough data to act upon.

This is where the professionals at ASB Resources can help! We have the knowledge, insights and expertise to help your organization gather, interpret and act upon the data it needs to make better decisions, track its performance and stay competitive in today’s tough and fast-evolving business environment. Schedule a chat with one of our experts today!