In today’s business world, data is the new gold. One of the ways for companies to keep running successfully is to proficiently manage data. It enables executives to make decisions driven by data insights and helps companies achieve their growth goals.
Since most businesses have large volumes of valuable data, it is essential to prioritize it as a driver of growth. Data can be related to customers, products and services, industry, competitors, and partners. All these areas of data come with challenges, but tax and finance data needs to meet diverse regulations for a business to operate globally. Thus, it can become particularly demanding to bring all the data together.
4 Ways to Leverage Data for Business Growth
In order to successfully leverage data, it is imperative to embrace data management and data governance. By having a strategic and holistic approach, businesses can open new possibilities and transform themselves by using data effectively.
Here are 4 ways that can help businesses produce better outcomes:
1. Understand your customers
Both B2C and B2B customers expect companies to provide them with personalized services. This is where data plays an important role. It enables you to better understand your customer’s demands and expectations. It helps in implementing strategies that allow engagement with the customer and results in customer loyalty.
- Anticipate customer needs by creating detailed customer profiles. With data, businesses can identify the in-demand products and services and build targeted marketing strategies for those customers. Data can help you segment the market by needs, and tailor the delivery accordingly.
- Gain insight into customer sentiment. There can be a change in customer sentiment due to different factors. Survey data and analysis of reviews on the surface may reveal little about this. However, with thorough data analysis, businesses can figure out the actual concerns of customers.
- Deliver seamless customer services. Customers today want to be served fast. For instance, bank customers on the call, on a website, physically present, or making a transaction at a point-of-sale terminal, need you to deliver services fast. For this purpose, it is essential to have a master data management system that provides a 360-degree view of customers. To ensure a seamless customer experience, develop robust self-service tools and equip frontline employees with the desired information.
2. Ensure Employee Engagement
Just like your customers, employees also want to have personalized experiences at their workplace. Often, businesses rely on surveys to gather information about employee needs and satisfaction, but that is not the only data that can tap into employee needs. For instance, by tracking the health and wellness data of employees, organizations can deliver personalized wellness programs to improve employee work-life balance.
With data analytics capabilities, you can overcome the following common challenges associated with employees:
- Discover causes of employee turnover. By tracking employee turnover across various employee segments such as fresh hires to senior staff, understand common reasons why employees leave or stay and cater to their unmet needs.
- Improve diversity and inclusion. Monitor employee progress by region, division, or other demographics to help create targeted strategies for improving outreach and addressing bias.
- Measure productivity tenure of new employees. Find out how much time it takes new hires to become productive and discover factors that could affect their performance, such as their immediate manager or department type.
3. Improve Agile Processes
It is a constant challenge to confront change, and agile management is a great approach to deal with it. Agile organizations are more capable to resist disruption as compared to their conventional peers. Data leveraging helps agile businesses in the following ways:
- Make data-based decisions. By using Key Performance Indicators, and outcome metrics, it becomes easier to make decisions. With the right data in place, your business will stay at par with changing trends.
- Build strategic partnerships internally. Departments like finance and HR are considered strategic partners in agile organizations. For instance, the finance department is responsible for forecasting and analysis, whereas HR addresses issues discovered as a result of this analysis.
4. Identify Growth Strategies
Companies with better data practices are more likely to be successful at entering new markets. They can leverage data to improve their R&D processes and implement sustainable and successful growth strategies.
- Identify and prioritize growth opportunities. Identify new opportunities and conduct a cost-benefit analysis for each to prioritize which one to pursue first, and when.
- Optimize customer experience. Every time your product or service is rolled out, it should be optimized to provide a seamless experience to the customer to generate higher returns on investment.
- Provide easy ways to give feedback. Give customers the ease to give feedback and collect it in a centralized system to easily measure the effectiveness of your strategy.
Conclusion
With good data management and data governance practices, businesses can enhance their data-leveraging capabilities and drive themselves toward adaptability, growth, and long-term sustainability.
