Six ways anyone can climb aboard the analytics train
1 PERSONALISE SERVICE Old school shopkeepers collected data in their heads while working behind the counter. They’d remember if a customer expressed a product preference and make sure to order enough in to tempt them the next time they were in store. That personalised service made for loyal and profitable customers.
Modern business owners can use technology to do the same thing on a grander scale. The key is to find ways of gathering data without alienating customers. An obvious way to do this is with loyalty cards, where customers are rewarded for handing over information. Just don’t ask for too much at first, no one likes form filling.
Another popular technique involves getting customers to ‘like’, say, a Facebook page in return for entering a competition. You’ll need to make sure they agree to the right permissions, but armed with that information you’ll be able to gather personal data about them along with access to their posts about their lifestyle choices and interests. 2 BENCHMARK Corporations spend hundreds of millions buying expensive ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems to get an insight into their business operations and potential opportunities. Small business can buy something similar for a few hundred dollars a year from, for example, 9Spokes (www.9spokes.com), an Auckland-based cloud app integrator.
9Spokes directs companies to appropriate
3 TURN YOUR DATA DIRECTLY INTO MONEY If there’s a digital component to your business, you may have an opportunity to gather data that has value to larger companies. It’s legally tricky, not to mention morally suspect, to sell customer names, addresses and personal information without their permission, but there’s nothing wrong with providing non-personalised trend data that gives buyers insights into local preferences and patterns.
This is something mobile phone companies are starting to do. The phone network knows where phones are and how fast they are moving. So they can tell, for example, if there’s a traffic hold-up at a bottleneck. There’s no need to give away any individual user’s information.
A radio station might be prepared to pay for this data to gather traffic information it can broadcast to listeners, for example. Or GPS companies might want it to route their customers around the jams. 4 START WITH WHAT YOU ALREADY HAVE It is fashionable for organisations, especially those dabbling in big data, to link disparate data sources, some of which is unstructured, to get new insights. That can be rewarding but it’s a lot of hard work.
Experts say companies often want to leap in with ambitious projects long before they’ve exhausted the analytical potential of the structured data they are sitting on. Using clean data you already have is likely to deliver results faster and cheaper than any other approach. 5 YOU MAY ALREADY USE BIG DATA If you have a web site and you use Google Analytics or Google Ads then you’re already dabblingdabb in the world of big data. You never downloaddow the vast quantities of data needed to u use the tools, nor do you have to handle the n number crunching, that’s all done for you by r remote cloud servers.
Google Analytics is a small taste of the big data world that you can use to learn how your customers respondresp to offers and the way things are presentedpresente to them on your web site. You can also get use useful information about where your custom customers live.
Meanwhile Google Ads provides tools to help you discover w what keywords potential customers are using to find the goods and products you sell. It calls on the billions of enquiries users type into Google’s search engine every day. 6 MINE SOCIAL MEDIA Spark’s network operations centre is a high tech system monitoring the performance of fixed-line, mobile and broadband services.
Yet one of the most visible screens on the wall in front of the team shows Twitter feeds following all the main telecommunications companies. It’s usually where engineers first learn of a major problem.pro
You can do the same with automated tools set up to watch your customers and your rivals. You’ll get early insights in to what people are buying and what ththey don’t like about your, or your rival’s, business.