6 Ways to Improve Your Business with Good Data

A SIMPLE STORY THAT WILL RESONATE WITH YOU

A mother once shared a story with me about her ten year old child who got a box of lego bricks as a gift. Attracted by the beautiful colours, he dashes off without as much a glance at his mum so he could quickly get to play.

But the child’s attraction and love for the lego bricks box went on for days, with no significant change of the bricks use.

His routine was simple, he would play with the bricks and play some more and toss them away when he became bored or toss them aside for the next day.

Eventually, his mother realised he didn’t have a picture of what he could do with the bricks.

Then she asked, “why don’t you let me show you?”,  as she placed the manual before him and started sorting out the colours, until each mould became a beautiful house.”

Her story, so simple, depicts the reality of many businesses today. Now, let’s break the analogy down a bit.

THE BRICKS, THE MANUAL AND YOUR ORGANISATION’S DATA

Let’s say the bricks represent your business – each colour for each business unit.

Imagine the (blue) stands for operations cost, another (yellow) stands for customer information, another (green) stands for sales categories and yet another (orange) stands for employees’ information.

The most appropriate thing is to sort each category into moulds and achieve the goal of creating a satisfying image out of the combinations of blocks.  For a child, this is for pure aesthetic. But for businesses, the question is do you collect data, or you casually let it keep flying uncollected, unsorted, and unutilised?

WHY YOU NEED DATA

Data speaks a lot about the nature, pattern, and trajectory of any business. It simply shows you a clear picture of the reality of your business, including each department and individual business unit. This helps you to keep your business reality in check, and helps you to make better decisions.

If I may ask, is your business reality and decision making data driven or ‘anyhowness’?

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH YOUR ORGANISATION’S DATA?

Your organisation’s data, like the pieces of lego blocks, needs to be classified and sorted into meaningful pieces of information that can help you make better business decisions.

Many businesses however have abandoned or discarded available data to celebrate small wins and business sales when they can maximise their productivity and results. The most puzzling part of this reality is, the data your business needs for mind blowing results are available to mine in your business. 

In this article, I have put together 6 ways that you can easily boost your business performance using everyday data that is generated by your business:

1. Help You Understand Why Your Customers Make Certain Decisions.

Your customers’ information, habits, and preferences are gold mines of data. This is what the likes of Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc. thrives on. These corporations literally feed on data mined from customers and subscribers. They constantly use them to boost their Artificial Intelligence algorithms, and Machine learning processes.

Most countries today have enacted laws to protect customers’ data because it is often exploited and sold to other businesses to make money. This is another reason to pay good attention to it and use it to boost your business. 

Customers data can:

  • Be used to cash in on referral opportunities and possibilities.
  • Be used as loyalty points and to show customers’ buying trends.
  • Be used for demographic behaviours to your goods and services.
  • Give good direction about location induced requests.
  • Give insights into where, who, and how you can attract more customers.

Just to mention a few.

2. Help You Keep Your Finance In Checks.

As simple as your income and expenditures may look on the sheet, it can reveal a lot about your business and can help make solid informed decisions.

A very good way to check the health status of your business is to extract and analyse data from your finances. 

Financial data mining:

Can help your probe analysis.

Can reveal how well you fare with your bookkeeping, and suggest adjustment needed.

Can help expose to you what you really don’t capture, and what you allow to slip by.

Can reveal the true worth of your business in terms of assets.

Can reveal how much you lose to charges (banks & payment gateways alike).

Will help you determine return on adverts and publicity investments, and many more.

3. Help You Drive Smooth Operations Flow with Stocks and Inventory data.

Your stocks and inventories are a catalogue of data that reveals a lot about your ease of operations flow.

Can you always guarantee product availability, and quality products and services? Yes… Is there a nexus between these parameters and unmined data in your business? Yes

Can a business daily operation logbook or sheet be mined to improve flow? Yes

Is it possible to never have pre-planned downtime in operations? Yes

All that can help you make these things an affirmative yes are in your pieces of information waiting to be mined as data.

The possibilities are endless.

4. Help You Improve Your Staff Morale and A High Retention Rate

If you are having challenges with staff morale and retention, you probably have tons of information pointing you to the issues but you might have daily ignored them. Nothing happens from the blues. All decisions stem from a series of activities that happened over time.

Business data mining:

Can help you further understand employee/employer relationships better.

Can help show factors responsible for retention or turnover rates.

Will enlighten about employees’ job satisfaction perception.

Is an insightful tool to manage employees’ loyalty and commitment.

Helps with easy deployment of Leadership 360 profiling.

It is possible to systemize services and product improvement through feedback generated from employees’ operations data .

5. Help You Increase your Business Performance with Sales & Marketing data.

You should not just be winking in the dark by throwing marketing and sales efforts everywhere. Let your business data, and previous marketing campaign instruct how you should handle your next sales and marketing drive. For example, you don’t have to always service a demography of your customers if your results from previous campaigns show that the target demography was not interested in your product.

Quadruple your sales with data informed decisions. 

6. Help You Maximixe Freebies To Gain Your Customer’s Loyalty.

If there is a sure way to generate more useful data that can be mined to transform your business, you need to look inward at your business and determine freebies you can give. It can be in the form of the service you render, or products you produce. As expected, more customers will patronise you while you are gifted amazing data for analysis.

For example, Google effectively deployed this strategy. While some of the services they freely offered have been discontinued, some are still in operation. Google+ is one of them. They were able to mine huge data for their Artificial intelligence (AI) use, and Machine Learning (ML) use. Today, most of the products and services enjoyed from Google are built and improved with the data mined from several freebies given.

Please note that this product or service must be well crafted and designed to give feedback or generate responses. That will be the pool of data capturing.

Finally, you don’t have to be a data scientist to take advantage of your business data mining. All you need are professionals to engage on a permanent or contract basis that can be of help.

If you don’t know any data analyst out there, talk to us through support@streetsmartlab.com or (+234)909 777 0126 and we will connect you with a specialist to handle your Business Data projects. 

Adeyiga Awomuti

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