As previously talked about in our blog, Implementing Data Analytics In An Organisation: A CFO Perspective, analytics can bring in some wonderful perspectives that may have been previously ignored. If your company has collected information over the years about your customers, your competitors, the market in general, et al., then that is a wealth of data that you are sitting on. It would be a shame to let such precious data sit collect dust in some indescript corner. As the world embraces big data, it is only safe to say that business leadership too should use data make informed decisions to better strategise the company’s goals.
Organisations, large and small, can now easily implement big data solutions into their day-to-day operations owing to the advent of Internet of Things and AI. With some professional expertise in the form of big data solutions and data scientists, the data can be translated into actionable insights that can help improve your company’s operational efficiency along with a slew of other benefits. Here we take a look at some of the ways data analytics can be beneficial to your organisation.
Assist company leadership in decision making
Every organisation is all about improving efficiency and cutting costs at some level or the other. As somebody in a leadership position, the onus rests on you to chart out the financial future of your company while helping to strategise it. But this task can be much simpler if backed by data and numbers instead of taking a shot in the dark. By recording and measuring different data points, you can narrow down on the performance metrics and adjust them depending on the organisation’s goals. Once you have this in place, it can help you devise the strategy you think would work best to ensure company-wide efficiency while minimising costs to achieve the goal in question. As an integral part of the company’s management, having the right data analytics tool in place can help you accurately preempt the future by analysing current and past patterns without sorting through the clutter of data to identify the most useful information is imperative.
Give an edge over competitors
Identifying trends in your market and making use of this knowledge is a wonderful way to stay on top of your game. One of the primary uses of analysing large amounts of data is to identify patterns within these data sets. They can give you insights into consumer and customer behaviours and market demand like never before. Armed with this information, you can drive innovation, chart out a plan for the next product or service from your company and explore new avenues of profit-making to ensure that you are always a step ahead of your competitors in the market.
Better customer satisfaction
By implementing data analytics in your company, you can have the company work on strict timelines in terms of deliverables to your customers. To understand this better, let us take the instance of a delivery business. A simple use of predictive analysis can set the right expectations with your customer from the beginning in terms of delivery timelines and delays, if any. By having data to be able to preempt any issues in delivery, you can improve your company’s performance by being able to manage such delays and ensure customer satisfaction by giving your valuable clients real-time updates.
In addition to this, recording data of your returning customers can also help you identify the ones you would like to nurture a long-term relationship with because as Michael LeBoeuf, the noted business author once said, “A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all.”
Improve the overall efficiency of the organisation
A recent study from IDC, a market research firm, showed that inefficiencies cost businesses over 20-30% of their revenue every year. Now imagine what you could do with those extra funds; maybe channelise it to your R&D, or towards customer service? The options are plenty! Having a single system of records and ensuring visibility of the data system to every department within the organisation, you can ensure that no process duplication, bottlenecks, redundancy, working in silos happens and that every entity of the company, whether it be an individual employee or a team, works towards the same goal as outlined as a part of the company’s goals. A transparent, real-time system will enable employees to drive more action towards core tasks and issues at every step of the way.
Help chalk out low-risk data driven action plans
With the use of data analytics, you can now help your organisation base its actions on solid, quantifiable, data evidence. This automatically minimises the risk associated with such an action plan as it is derived from past evidence and backed by data instead of “gut feelings” and “beliefs”. A strategy that is data-driven can most often foretell risks while also providing a validity for any data-driven decisions taken.
Better visualisation of data
When it comes to making quick decisions and deciding key action plans on the go, as a CFO or somebody in a leadership position, it becomes imperative that you be able to arrive at the decision without rummaging through multiple Excel spreadsheets. The way important data is presented to somebody from the C-suite is of paramount importance as it helps them visualise the data to make more effective decisions. A good data analytics tool will be able to show CFOs their Key Performance Indicators or KPIs as they happen on one screen, gaining real-time insights into the sales and customer balances, thereby helping you create better decisions with improved efficiency.
The uses of data analytics are plenty and the ones mentioned here is only the leading edge. To truly be able to take your company to the next level and chase aggressive growth, the need of the hour for the company leadership is to embrace data analytics to keep abreast this digital time and age.
