If you aren’t leveraging your analytics, you’re missing out.
No, really. It’s safe to say that many online businesses track customer data. According to BuiltWith, a website that tracks what software is used by websites, over 29 million live sites are using Google Analytics.
But how well are businesses making use of their analytics or more commonly known, big data?
According to GE Global Innovation Barometer 2016, 73% of senior innovation experts that participated in the survey have increased their ability to analyze big data. This is up from 43% reported in 2014. This is a dramatic and noteworthy increase.
If senior innovation experts can see the value in analyzing big data, then perhaps you should too. According to BusinessDictionary.com, the purpose of analytics is to improve your business by gaining knowledge to improve or make changes.
What kind of knowledge can you gain? If you are a business that provides self-help content (for example, how-to articles, troubleshooting tips, or installation guides), you can gain knowledge about:
This is just a tiny sample of the knowledge you can gain. It would take far more than this blog to cover it all.
(*Besides make pretty graphs and pie charts.)
If customers are consistently searching on the same terms and phrases, you should find out why.
Just because a page is hugely popular doesn’t necessarily mean all is well. It’s always wise to review your most popular pages to check for possible improvements.
… any kind of data analysis is a constant work in progress and should be tailored to your specific business needs …
4 ways to leverage data to improve your customer service decisions
How often you should you review your data will depend on your business needs. Customer feedback should be addressed as it comes in. Other items, like most common search terms/phrases could be reviewed on a weekly basis.
If you don’t have the skills to analyze your data, your data is worthless. I’ve identified some relatively basic actions you can take with a tiny sample of the data you can potentially collect. To truly take advantage of your data, you need a data scientist or data sciences team. According to kdnuggets.com, Businesses Will Need One Million Data Scientists by 2018. Depending on the size of your business, you may get by with a single data scientist. However, chances are, you would benefit from a data sciences team. How you do that is entirely up to you and the needs of your business. Some businesses choose to grow their data sciences team in house while others hire consultants.
Analytics are a powerful tool that should be an integral part of your day-to-day business activities. Taking advantage of analytics can help you to reach your business goals and succeed in today’s increasingly competitive market.