Data-driven culture key to business growth

In the last decade, data has shown itself to be more than just facts and statistics that a company collects - it has become integral to business growth for firms in Singapore. When analysed, data can provide a company with insights that help it become more efficient and strategic, and identify new business opportunities that may have otherwise been overlooked.

Data brings a science-based approach to business decisions, which enables companies to always focus on the most important problems and opportunities. Even in areas of work perceived as more a form of art, data has the ability to bring a level of science and accountability to them.

In areas like marketing for instance, data has begun to replace intuition in the realm of decision making. More companies are embracing a data-led approach, where they rely on data from the get-go to design and launch campaigns in a bid to promote and sell their products in a more targeted manner.

This is a very different scenario from less than five years ago. Data did not feature prominently in business functions like customer service and marketing. Then, data was mostly utilised for evaluation purposes: to track how well a campaign performed, what the costs were, and its impact on the business.

Today, a paradigm shift is happening. Data is increasingly hailed as a competitive advantage that provides companies with customer insights, and has become the guiding principle behind decisions. Companies increasingly use customer data to predict customer needs, desires and future behaviours - and use these insights to develop personalised strategies for the highest possible business impact. In addition, we see that data has permeated other business aspects such as inventory management, supply chain management.

It is thanks to digital platforms, analytics software, cookies and tags that companies can now make projections, track, report on and demonstrate ROI on virtually everything they do. That popular old adage of “half my advertising works, I just don’t know which half”, could well be a thing of the past.

There are two ways in which data can power a firm’s growth efforts – the first being a data-driven approach, and the second being a data-informed approach. In data-driven decision making, data alone takes precedence in the decision-making process. For instance, if there is data which indicates that showing an advertisement ten times a day in a movie theatre will allow a company to reach its targeted number of users, the company will do just that.

Whereas in data-informed decision making, data - and other variables are used as tools to create a deeper, holistic understanding on the customer experience. Companies can use data to track – and respond to the performance of a running business campaign in real time. For example, when it comes to online festivals such as 11.11, e-commerce operators might run hourly campaigns as this gives them the flexibility to adjust their strategies throughout the day, based on data such as value-per-visit.

In Singapore, companies are increasingly taking to a dynamic, data-led approach. Even organisations like Singapore’s leading insurer brought in a personalised approach of a financial advisor “online”. By analysing customer data, they were able to, amongst other things, tailor its online presence to each customer’s unique needs. This led to them seeing a 92% increase in the click-through rate of its campaign.

In another example, a local media company recently embarked on a journey to better understand its readers and serve them personalised content that they will appreciate. By leveraging big data, they were able to analyse news themes that appealed to readers, identify topical preferences, say sports, and then offer the reader more sports-related content and options. This personalisation helped increase readers’ time spent on their digital platforms and boosted monetisation opportunities further.

The death of the data silo
As data-led approaches catch on, a new type of workplace dynamic is steadily forming. Firms seeking to attract customers increasingly find themselves having to engage and work collaboratively across the organisation, including working closely alongside teams that manage a company’s data which traditionally operated in siloes in the past. This emerging model of data-led collaboration is breathing new life into companies’ ability to glean fresh customer insights, and make informed business decisions.

However, many companies struggle to achieve this pinnacle of collaboration and a variety of reasons are at play here.

The first is inertia within the organisation, which could take the form of red tape or legacy systems. As a result of this inertia and lack of access, different teams within the organisation might not communicate with one another. Access to valuable company data also becomes structurally limited to teams that require it to optimise their operations. For instance, without big data, it is difficult for firms to run effective campaigns.

Another reason is that a company’s data is not stored in one place. According to a 2017 Allocadia report , data silos and dispersed data render 69% of organisations unable to provide a single customer view. As a result of data silos, companies lose the opportunity to properly understand their audience or gain a full insight into their campaign’s performance.

What can companies do to rectify this? First, they should work to eradicate inertia or data silos within the business. As part of that, leaders should work to build awareness across the organisation around the benefits of utilising data to achieve greater efficiencies and enhance the customer journey. Once companies understand how customers connect with their brand, they will be able to create more engaging experiences that will have a lasting brand impact. At the same time, companies should also live and breathe its data-led approach within the organisation by working to eradicate unnecessary bureaucratic processes and data exclusivity, and building a culture and environment where teams are able to come together to as bold questions and create new value for the customer.

Secondly, companies must invest in the right mix of data analytics tools and implement a data-led strategy and decision-making process within the organisation. This will ensure that the right foundations are laid, and that as the company grows, it will be able to retain customers and upsell or cross-sell their products more intelligently and effectively. At the end of the day, customers reap the benefits when companies make a concerted effort to invest in improving the customer experience.

In this age of data, businesses will only come into a burgeoning amount of data, and pressure to leverage all that precious information to drive, monitor and justify their operations and activities. With the widespread availability of big data and analytics tools, the stage is certainly set for more companies to embrace a data-driven culture.