Going back to basics
COVID has turned businesses upside down and highlighted weaknesses in legacy systems used within organisations. Organisations are now in a position to consider either resuming business-as-usual practices or seeing the pandemic as a fresh opportunity to reinvent in order to thrive in the new economy.
Those who have gone ‘back to basics’ and rethought a more innovative, data-driven approach are strategically driving revenue, enhancing customer experience, and managing costs. In fact, more than ever before, data and analytics, combined with faster delivery, reliability, and scalability are now critical to uncover new revenue streams and enhance commercial offerings.
Data is data, how you derive insights unlocks its value
There are now over 44 zettabytes of data being generated every year. At an organisational level, a business can have millions or billions of data points, but it is the insights you can glean from the data that hold value. So how do we take the right data sets and turn them into actionable insights that support business objectives like revenue growth, enhanced customer experience, or cost management?
Critical data-driven revenue pillars explained
There are two pillars of generating revenue. First, organisations can infuse analytics seamlessly at key decision points and go beyond traditional dashboards. To achieve this, organisations need to articulate their insights outside the dashboard. While dashboards are handy to communicate data, they do not drive actionable insights as staff are unlikely to check the dashboards every morning.
The real value is created when data-driven insights and critical data sources are available at key points of business decision-making. Organisations want their data to be relevant, in context, and personalised. When the right data sets are available at the right place and at the right time, organisations will derive far more valuable insights to drive faster decision making at scale. By infusing analytics at those key decision points, organisations have an exciting opportunity to monetise and leverage these data-driven insights immediately.
The second pillar of generating revenue is by embedding data into the solutions, applications, and interactions leveraged by key stakeholders such as customers, partners, and suppliers.
A common sentiment is “we want it better, faster, cheaper but you can only do two.” However, stakeholders want all three. So how do organisations get better margins from the data they have?
By leveraging the power of data, it’s easier to understand business problems and goals such as generating revenue or addressing a customer issue, which therefore optimises stakeholder interactions, enhances customer experience, or manages costs.
Standing out from the crowd
Having the right tools to decipher through data and give an organisation the right information at the right time can be revolutionary to a business.
As an example, Sisense recently helped a large retailer remedy their customer ‘churn’ problem by infusing data analytics across the organisation.
Before leveraging Sisense, the retailer had many manual processes. Their staff was required to check an Excel spreadsheet every morning to view and enter data on customer orders. Sometimes the staff found that an order was delayed for more than 72 hours and the customer hadn’t been contacted.
Once the retailer began infusing analytics into the business, employees started getting an alert about delayed packages. As part of the alert, the staff member was given a list of actions they could activate to compensate the customer for a delayed order, such as a free gift or discount.
These alerts are all now API driven. The insights are sourced from the dashboard and automatically offered to the staff member at the point of decision making. The team no longer needs to access a dashboard or an Excel spreadsheet to understand what they need to do. The process is instantaneous. When something happens, the staff gets a message immediately.
By ‘infusing’ data analytics, the retailer has now significantly improved its customer experience. Their customer satisfaction increased, repeat sales became more evident, and complaints decreased significantly around the holiday season. And this is just one of hundreds of examples of great data-driven strategies currently revolutionising business operations all around the world.
New year, a new way of working
Looking back, the way data and insights have been procured has evolved significantly over the past thirty years. In the 1990s, organisations required help from large enterprises or the IT department to access data-driven insights. It was a cumbersome and lengthy process that could take over a month.
The mid-2000s saw the advent of desktop solutions, business intelligence, and analytics. Data visualisation and storytelling became important for future-focused organisations as they allowed them to manage the data internally. These were the best-of-breed solutions.
Now, organisations have next-generation technology, cloud-based solutions, API driven and AI-driven machine learning solutions. Technology is changing constantly and offering more exciting and groundbreaking new opportunities.
These dynamic changes to technology means that organisations are at different stages of the analytics maturity curve. Some organisations are still using manual Excel spreadsheets to manage their data, while others are at the cutting edge of innovation, leveraging data in exceptional ways to drive business growth.
With the landscape evolving so rapidly, we are currently on the precipice of change once again with infused analytics. The new year brings with it exciting opportunities to unlock new revenue streams, infusing analytics into commercial offerings, and turnaround operational efficiencies at scale – all through the power of data.
This article is written by Rohan Persaud, director of channels and alliances at Sisense for APAC.
Sisense is a business intelligence company. Sisense Fusion is its highly customisable and AI-driven analytics cloud platform that infuses intelligence for companies.
