Let’s start this interesting discussion with one question- What are you using your data analytics for? Run a pipeline of monthly reports? Or Siloed to one team only to bring them up when required? Do you think you are leveraging the implemented solutions to bring out the maximum ROI? If not or if this made you think about your data needs or requirements. Keep reading.
One of the best Data Analytics I’ve seen recently is “A Day in the Life of Americans” by Nathan Yau (In all honesty, this was created long ago. I’ve come across it recently). It is as the name states, A day in the life of Americans but it has been beautifully visualized to show the transitions from one phase to the next and not just showing the amount of time spent by hours in a table.
You might be thinking why am I showing this and talking about Analytics. Think about it, this is a very basic dataset with what people are doing. For a marketer, this is a treasure trove. Knowing the leisure time of a person to know when to provide solutions for the customer. Or finding out the time of possible interaction is something that every sales and marketing person wants to know.
Now let’s extrapolate this to the data usage of every organization whatever the industry or sector might be. You would have Customer Data, Social Media data, CRM data, and Finance data to list a few. Are you leveraging all this?
For starters what we mean by Data Analytics is meaning the 4 types of data Analytics, namely:
- Descriptive Analytics: what happened?
- Diagnostic Analytics: why it has happened?
- Predictive Analytics: what is likely to happen in the future?
- Prescriptive Analytics: what is the best course of action?
In simple terms, if you’re driving a car descriptive data is like driving a car by viewing into the rearview mirror, and if you’re lost diagnostic data is like finding out where or why were you lost. Predictive analytics is like driving by looking at the road and Prescriptive analytics is driving with a GPS! It tells you where to take turns, how far are you from your destination, etc. (This has become essential especially for driving).
In this blog, anywhere we talk about Data Analytics Solutions or Data Analytics Consulting, I mean some or all four these.
Let’s get into the topic then.
Why do you need an Analytics Solution?
One. You can have a centralized of the data and of the operations of your organization. Instead of moving in a siloed approach integrate your data in one place and analyze the data. Before you find out what is required for the future, finding insights from the past and finding information for the present is of utmost importance.
Two. Similar to what I was talking about finding insights from the past (Descriptive and Diagnostics Data), Analytics solutions would give you the opportunity to get deep insights into your data.
Three. Forecasting your upcoming results. This might require considerable infrastructure, but once you start working with forecasting techniques there is no turning back. Now we even have simulation games like Markstrat, by Microsoft that helps users plan their requirements by visualizing both your and your competitor’s data.
As you can see, from our three short reasons how data analytics is essential for your business to stay competitive and not just improve financially but also improve the customer experience such that you would have a long-term advantage.
Now coming back to our first question- What are you using your data analytics for? Let’s answer this question with insights into how you can use data analytics.
In an interesting article by HBR, on how to utilize data, they talk about solving critical business questions, dubbed as Key-Business Questions or KBQ. Instead of being stuck in the left top corner trying to solve questions that are pipe-dream (which you don’t have resources to work on).
Source: Harvard Business Review
For example, think if you are an e-commerce company and are wondering why consumers aren’t moving from cart to check-out. Then your KBQ can be “ How can we drive consumers to buy products from the cart?”. For this, the sample data taken about common reasons for checkout abandoning a shopping cart is taken from a study conducted by Baymard in 2019, which showed the reasons to be:
Now in the process of solving the question we got some data as to why consumers might be abandoning the process of buying. With this, we can identify the potential reasons for your website and also the ones the might arise in the feature. Also, such data-driven decision-making can help you take proactive steps to prevent potential mishaps in the future.
Analytics consultants approach a problem with two things in mind. One- the end result and two- the data needed. Let’s talk about data first, most organizations need solutions but are they collecting, or do they have the data required? Suppose you are into email marketing, you need the details number of opens and people who might be interested in the content you sent. But what if you don’t collect the data of the exact people who have opened the mail, your efforts might have gone to waste. So, collecting data and judiciously using it is important.
Next, keeping the end result in mind is tricky with requirements, as it may be with respect to supervised or unsupervised learning, but that’s for a talk on another day. But we can talk about three key areas where analytics can be used and is on the rising trend nowadays, like:
- Sentiment Analysis: All you need is the #hashtag and Voila you can extract the data from social media and analyze it at the tip of your fingers with either coding or non-coding platforms like R.
- Fraud Detection: Especially with the case of financial transactions, with millions of transactions happening every day, using analytics to flag fraudulent transactions can save you both time and money.
- Predictive Maintenance: Plant and Machinery are the lifelines of any manufacturing or automotive company. They form the bottleneck in case any maintenance is required, when not predict the maintenance schedule and remove possible bottlenecks.
In short, Data Analytics Solutions and Data Analytics Consulting can help you bring out insights from your data, that you didn’t think about previously. With a combined industry experience with consulting experience with technical expertise in data and analytics, Polestar Solutions can help you leverage your data to bring out the maximum ROI for your business.
