How do companies innovate successfully? What’s the secret to sustainable growth? How do you build a thriving corporate culture? There’s no single answer to these questions, but a common thread among companies that innovate, grow, and build a thriving culture successfully is their ability to leverage data to drive decision-making.

According to a recent Tableau survey, companies that effectively use data analytics and data-driven decision-making increase revenue and profits by 8% and reduce costs by 4%. This likely doesn’t come as a surprise—data has the potential to accelerate business success. That’s why so many companies aim to improve their ability to leverage data and technology to support their growth.

However, while companies have access to vast amounts of data, many struggle to truly leverage data to develop a strategy that aligns with their business goals. To leverage data effectively, it’s essential to embrace both data governance and data management practices. With a holistic, strategic approach, you can unlock new possibilities and use data to drive decisions across your organization.

Challenges to Leveraging Data Successfully 

Despite having access to significant amounts of data, many companies struggle to leverage data effectively. Often, more immediate and urgent challenges—like customer satisfaction, competition, and regulatory compliance—take precedence over data initiatives. Client-facing projects, operational efficiencies, and daily fires compete for their attention, and data projects get deprioritized.

Because organizations don’t prioritize data management and governance, data is managed reactively. This leads to siloed data, making it difficult to connect data points and extract actionable insights. Instead of a proactive approach to leveraging technology and data, companies end up implementing isolated, reactive solutions that don’t contribute to a broader data strategy.

Four Ways Better Data Capabilities Improve Your Business Strategy

1. Understand Your Customers Better: Customers increasingly expect personalized experiences.  When you leverage data to develop a strategy tailored to customer needs, it becomes easier to engage prospects at the top and middle of the funnel and promote loyalty once they become customers:

• Gain insights on customer sentiment: Thorough data analysis complemented with analysis of surveys and reviews can help identify the true sources of customer concerns.
• Anticipate your customer’s needs by building comprehensive customer profiles: By leveraging data, you can anticipate customer needs, segment your audience, and tailor your marketing strategies.
• Create seamless omnichannel experiences: Master data management enables you to have a 360-degree view of customers, ensuring accurate information and smoother interactions.

2. Maximize the value of your Contact Center: Data-driven reporting for call centers can be useful in a variety of different ways depending on the needs of your organization:

• Improved decision-making: Real-time data means that you now have access to the most accurate information available about your customers and call center, which contributes to more confident and informed decision-making. 
• Enhanced customer experience: Better insights help resolve frustrations quickly, reduce delays, boost satisfaction, and support target achievement.
• Increased operational efficiency and performance management: Increased efficiency: With effective reporting, you can prioritize resources confidently, addressing key customer needs and improving performance.

3. Improve Agility:  Agile transformation offers a powerful solution to navigate constant business changes, as agile organizations consistently outperform their competitors and are better equipped to adapt to disruption. The ability to leverage data effectively is central to achieving this agility:

• Data-based decision making: Using KPIs, OKRs, and key outcome metrics provides an objective guide to decision-making. Choosing and then trusting the right data to continuously monitor your industry and business will alert you to changes and trend.

• Strategic internal partnerships creation: In agile organizations, departments like HR and finance are seen as key strategic partners. Relying on data to deliver insights is key. For instance, leaders across the business rely on finance for forecasting and analysis, and HR is tasked with addressing an ever-growing swath of issues, including employee performance and well-being.
• Empower employees to problem-solve quickly. Employees at all levels face new challenges every day. Access to comprehensive data makes it possible for them to identify root causes, model future scenarios, respond quickly, and repeat.

4. Tap Into Your Employees’ Needs More Effectively: Like customers, employees also expect personalized experiences. Leverage technology to analyze employee wellness data, survey feedback, and performance metrics. By understanding employee turnover, diversity, and performance, you can use data to improve HR strategies.

5. Identify Successful and Sustainable Growth Strategies: Sixty-one percent of companies with mature data practices enter new markets successfully. Behind their success is the ability to leverage data improve R&D efforts and implement the most viable strategies:

• Identify growth opportunities across the customer lifecycle: Discover new ways to offer value to customers and predict revenue impact.
• Prioritize opportunities systematically: Conduct cost-benefit analyses to determine the most viable opportunities.
• Optimize customer experience across channels: Ensure seamless rollouts of new products or services by leveraging insights from customer data.

Provide easy ways to log and track feedback: Make it easy to collect and centralize feedback so you can measure the effectiveness of your new strategy and adapt when needed.

Improving your data analytics capabilities doesn’t simply mean collecting more data or hiring more analysts. Without a guiding strategy, even the best data won’t deliver its full value. To truly leverage data to develop a strategy, it’s critical to invest in data governance and data management practices to enhance data maturity and use information more effectively across the organization.

That’s what we help our clients do at Kenway. This case study stands as a powerful testimony of how Kenway helped a software firm improve its analytics capabilities by building a business intelligence roadmap, implementing standardized reporting, building and interpreting reports, and establishing the framework for sustainable value realization.

Ready to Leverage Data and Technology?

Do you want to use analytics more effectively for your business, but don’t know where to start? Kenway can get your analytics engine up and running. To learn how, contact us.

FAQs

How do you leverage data to develop a strategy?

To leverage data in developing a strategy, companies need to adopt a holistic, strategic approach that includes data governance and data management. This enables them to effectively use data throughout their organization to make informed decisions and create strategies that align with their business goals.

How to leverage big data?

Big data can be leveraged by ensuring it is integrated into the company’s strategic initiatives. This involves creating robust data analytics capabilities, prioritizing data governance, and employing data-driven decision-making to identify and act on business opportunities, customer insights, and operational efficiencies.

How to leverage customer data?

Customer data can be leveraged by integrating it across all channels to gain actionable insights. This enables creating personalizing experiences and driving informed decisions. Effective data governance and management are key to maximizing its value.