Data Strategy Course
Section 2.2 Data Analysis Module
Hello and welcome to my course – on ‘Data Strategy’.
This is Ade Awokoya from LBAcademy. I am a Digital Transformation Adviser, enabling support for Business to innovate on a digital platform, with a focus on your business model.
In this session, on Data Analysis, we’ll be covering the fundamentals and best practices of good data management, the technology that’s available to help and discuss how and when business should apply them as they grow.
Data is a business skill. Like understanding budgets, managing people, procuring products and services and engaging with partners, the skill of data is something that you and your team must develop for getting and staying ahead.
Since data is an enabler and a conduit for connecting the organisation, you want to move to a place where data is used by the business to drive the agenda. Data is as much about culture and your people as it is about process technology and other factors that influence the overall business ecosystem. But being digital is not as simple as people, process and technology.
Data Analysis Importance
Data analysis is the process of collecting, modeling, and analyzing data to extract insights that support decision-making. To drive success of your marketing strategies, you’ll need to identify new potential customers, and track customer satisfaction by analyzing your customer service department’s performance.
Focus on customers, by using data analysis to get a 360° view of customer activities, you can understand which channels they use to communicate with you, their demographics, interests and purchasing behaviors. Also, you can use a [dashboard] software, for data visualisation to present relevant business information in a professional and interactive way to your partners and stakeholders.
As a business owner, data analysis helps you make business decisions based on facts and not simple intuition.This will help you understand where to detect business growth opportunities, invest your capital, predict your incomes and anticipate problems.
Customer relationship management systems
A company needs a strategy for figuring out how to focus on customers. Simply put, CRM is a cycle of interrelated activities representing the customer life cycle, spanning all interactions from acquisition and selection of customers, selling, building loyalty, and retaining and extending the relationship. A CRM system helps infuse technology and automate some or all of the activities and processes that comprise the CRM cycle. It can contribute to both efficiency and effectiveness of a company’s customer management activities.
For companies, CRM offers a compelling value proposition include Salesforce automation. In short, CRM enables the transition from mass marketing to mass customisation. And every business in the world is trying to understand how to make the customer experience more personalised and richer. CRM systems get you one step closer to this goal.
Business analytics and reporting
When it comes to monitoring the key business goals of your organization, more curation is required to give everyone access to all data and the ability to analyze it for the most strategic data needs. The job of the business analysts should be to think very carefully about which data and insights to include.
Analysts need to think about the message they want to communicate. Curating the most important insights from data will ensure that the insights are understood by everyone, and there isn’t a risk that things will get missed or misinterpreted.
A well-designed dashboard or report should be created that informs the key decision makers about the most important insights. It should start with the question and then contain the data and the most appropriate data visualization that might show the data over time.
The best data visualizations should also contain ‘comments’ to make them easier to understand. It is important to remember that not everyone in the organization finds it easy to read graphs or data visualizations, hence the dashboard should contain [text based ] narratives that outline the key insights and interpretations people should be aware of.
Overall, it enables companies to control the data storytelling for the most important and most strategic data driven insights.
Examples of how data is transforming everyday business processes.
Number one, improving meetings.
It can help us cut down the tiresome admin involved with meetings. For example, voice assistance such as Google Assistant can schedule appointments for you.
Second, automating content generation.
Thanks to data and A.I., machines are now capable at generating engaging, informative text.
Third, enhancing sales and marketing.
Many CRM solutions now incorporate data analytics, enabling sales teams to automatically create valuable insights. For example, Salesforce Einstein II technology can predict which customers are most likely to generate more revenue and which are most likely to take their customer elsewhere. Then there’s widespread use of chat bots on websites, which is helping organisations boost sales, drive revenue and grow their audience.
Big Data and Analytics
Big data refers to the vast volumes and types of information that companies can now collect and process using increasingly high-tech systems. This comes from both internal sources (within your company) and external ones e.g. customers, suppliers, and the broader market. It is both structured, such as your customer purchase data and unstructured e.g. Internet search results. However all data has to be put into structured formats to be analysed.
When you combine big data with effective analytics, you have a key competitive advantage for organizations today. What capabilities does your organisation need to succeed?