The Power of Analytics in Transforming Data into Decisions
Analytics is central to business strategy. Here's how to turn data into critical decisions that ensure business continuity and make a huge difference in profitability over time.
Decision making is one of the most crucial and toughest aspects of running a successful business. A single right or wrong decision can entirely change the course of your business.
But is decision making really that tough when you have solid proof to back it up?
The complexity of decision-making and its varied consequences is probably the reason why decision-analytics is on the rise. According to a Gartner study, more than 33% of large organizations will rely on decision intelligence by 2023.
To get a head start, you can start exploiting the power of data and analytics right now. Empowering your business with analytics will help you optimize your operations, anticipate risks, and make decisions that focus on your business’s growth and profitability.
Read on to learn more about how analytics can transform your business and how you can use it to transform raw, seemingly meaningless data into precise, tangible decisions.
Improve Products
Adding new product features and improving existing ones is crucial for the growth of any business. Understanding your customers’ requirements and market demands can be extremely challenging and confusing.
Product analytics enable you to analyze your customer journey. Starting from customer onboarding and going through all the other phases, you can understand how your customers are engaging with your products.
Using this data, you will know what your product lacks and what is your product good at. This can be a potent tool that will help you drive decisions on product upgrades and new product launches.
You can make use of powerful product analytics tools that give you eye-opening insights into customer behavior. Mixpanel is one that helps you visualize data and drive game-changing decisions based thereon. You’ll know exactly how your users are progressing through the onboarding process, how much time (and when) they are spending on your product, and how they are actually using (or trying to use) it.
It helps to know how each of your KPIs is performing in real-time. You can set up alerts to detect sudden drop in metrics and respond to incidents with quick fixes to minimize losses.
Apply Business Intelligence
Business intelligence is a technology-driven function where you collect data from internal and external sources, and use it to drive strategic and tactical decisions that can be transformational in deciding the future of your company with incremental steps – you can streamline your processes, identify bottlenecks, remove redundancies, improve operational efficiency, and mitigate risks.
This works by using big data systems, data warehousing, analysis, and management tools that can derive trends and forecasts from current performance and help you in business planning and estimation. You can essentially make sense of all your raw data, and turn it into something more actionable.
Not every business is the same, and nor its data can be compared to others. Therefore, the you need the right analytics and reporting tools that can be customized to fit your requirements and scenarios. Sisense is a powerful cloud-based business intelligence platform that integrates AI-powered analytics into processes, applications and products. This means you can automate multi-step actions in your workflows to provide a customized experience to every user.
The best part is that you can connect and process multiple data sources from the cloud and web applications, create relationships between datasets with drag-and-drop to visualize big data, and uncover powerful insights through interactive dashboards.
Basically, the right analytics tools and processes help speed up digital transformation by answering complicated questions with data.
Drive Employee Performance
Strategy doesn’t stop at decision making or planning – execution is what drives revenue in the modern organization. Analytics can help you focus on streamlining in-house operations, improving employee productivity, and driving increased performance within each function.
From marketing to DevOps, finance to HR, analytics helps reduce employee productivity and increase employee engagement. Using “people analytics,” businesses can find exactly what is going wrong in everyday operations (such as the onboarding time isn’t adequate or workers don’t have the right tools to do their jobs) and bring about immediate and lasting process improvements.
People analytics can also help you find the right talent and increased employee retention. AI-based analytics tools have been shown to work across sectors like retail, manufacturing, government, supply chain, software, and healthcare by predicting employee attitudes, behaviors, and inclinations correctly.
For instance, suppose that you are struggling to hire the right people. You can use analytics to identify your current top performing employees, understand their common traits, and develop an ideal candidate persona or profile (based on career history, achievements, and values) that would be a perfect fit for your business.
The data train doesn’t stop at hiring and performance. Algorithms can now crunch data and predict which employees might quit your organization and when! Credit Suisse used employee churn analytics to reduce attrition that results in annual savings of $75 million to $100 million a year.
Any SMB can now use commodity analytics to drive HR decisions that retain top employees, save operational costs and build a lasting, performance-driven culture in the workplace.
Empower Your Business Using Analytics
Analytics influence every part of your business strategy and is integral to continuity and operations. Seemingly small decisions, when compounded over time, can add up to a huge difference in your business’s profitability.
To not leverage the wealth of data, information and tools available is to dig a competitive hole for yourself. Start creating decision models that help you turn data into value right now, if you haven’t already.