How do you look at your organization’s data? The answer will likely be the same as how you look at your organization. The businesses that do more to use their data to improve their business’ process, policies, and strategies, are the businesses that, by-in-large, are the ones that grow more rapidly and see more operational efficiency.  This month, we thought we would look at four ways your business can use their data to actively improve its operations.

About Your Data

Before we get into how you should be using your data to be more successful, you need to understand what types of data you have that you probably aren’t using. Sure most businesses have basic metrics that they use to evaluate productivity, solve business problems, and innovate the way they do things. That’s not to say that you are deploying your data as strategically as you may want to, but you do things that utilize the information that you have on hand. 

The thing is: There is a lot more where that comes from. 

The average business only uses about a quarter of the usable data. This keeps decision makers at these organizations from making the best decisions they can. How would using more data make a difference? Most of that data on its own is basically useless. It’s an order form here, a customer review there. No business owner or decision maker is going to go all-in on strategy off of an anecdote. If that data is correlated with other data of its type and reviewed thoroughly, you can make some pretty significant insights about your staff, your customers, and the health of your business. So let’s take a look at three ways you can use your data to your business’ benefit.

Build Your Offering for Repeat Business

One of the best ways to build a successful business is to become what is known as a customer-centric company. You are, after all, in business to fill a need in the market and depend on your customers to help your business grow. One way to do this through data is to pay attention to what is called your “churn rate”. This is a metric that measures how your company retains customers. It is much more expensive to sell to new customers than to sell to repeat customers, so if you find that customers are leaving or not engaging with your company, you can find out how to build your offering to best meet the needs of your loyal customers. 

Improve Targeted Innovation

The data you get from your customers can really make a difference in the way you go about innovating your offering. Innovation is important for every company and the data can tell you exactly how to go about doing that. You can use analytics to help understand how to build better offerings or better ascertain who is buying them. Innovating and evolving to meet the needs of your potential customer will keep you searching for what’s next, a good strategy for any business.

Measuring Employee Performance

Data doesn’t just help you build a strategy for how to interact with customers, it can really help you improve your internal processes and help your employees work more effectively toward your business’ goals. Most managers can tell the achievers from the rest of their staff, but with the data you can actually get specific insight about employee performance that can help you put your resources in the right place to maximize productivity and create a better work environment for specific employees. When a person likes coming to work, it makes doing their job a lot easier. 

If you can think up a metric, you can measure it with enough data. The hard part is getting systems in place that allow for the collection and processing of this data to give you the information you want. This is where Dresner Group comes in. We can help you set up a data warehouse that feeds into analytics and intelligence platforms where you can get a real view of your staff, vendor relationships, and most importantly your customers. Give us a call today at (410) 531-6727 to learn more.