Taking Action: Translating Data Analytics from a Noun into a Verb
Without the ability to operationalize your analytics, your dashboard is useless.
Data analytics should be a verb, not a noun. A verb implies action, and your analytics must produce actionable results that drive your business performance. You can capture robust data, and process it with advanced analytics tools, but if you fail to embed the analytics in an automated and repeatable manner, at the exact point in your operational work flow when they are most needed, you are left with a one-time, manual effort that is difficult to duplicate.
Automating the Customer Lifecycle
Think about it. You’re gathering information at every stage of the customer lifecycle from initial acquisition to ongoing retention. You cross reference data from multiple sources such as credit and payment history, location and interests, usage patterns and service experience. You go through the considerable effort of preparing, cleansing and segmenting this data to create the advanced analytics scenarios or models. As a result, you are able to apply the model(s) to a data set and derive valuable insights. But in order to derive value on an ongoing basis, your analytics platform must possess the capability to unlock hidden insights in an automated, continuous manner without human intervention to optimize your customer acquisition and retention programs. In the end, the goal is to minimize churn and maximize margins to boost the organization’s profitability.
Operationalizing Analytics
Applying advanced analytics to this massive and diverse data to produce actionable results is a challenging proposition. However, conducting this exercise without a longer-term approach to easily operationalize the analytics will end up producing one-time results that are not repeatable. Forrester analyst, Brian Hopkins, stressed the importance of such a plan in a recent article about the importance of turning insight into action. According to the article, organizations must have the following pieces in place to devise a more effective data analytics strategy:
- Determine what business insights will make the biggest impact
- Operationalize those insights into the business process to more effectively engage customers and equip employee’s to take action
- Develop a culture of continuous learning to measure and learn from the results
Working with a partner who has an established record of not only providing advanced analytics solutions, but also has a proven approach to operationalizing analytics often yields a fresh perspective and provides an opportunity to minimize risk in deploying complex analytics in your work flow.
Drive Meaningful ROI with Analytics
First, you need to work with a partner who has assembled a cross functional team with diverse experience including the following: business professionals who understand the domain, technical skill sets to build the models, and data science experts to analyze and refine the model for optimal performance. Combining expertise on all of these areas ensures a holistic approach to data analytics. The final, critical, and often neglected capability required for a successful analytics deployment is the ability to easily integrate the models into a business process for ongoing results, which, after all, is the entire point of investing in data analytics. Having all of these perspectives at the table will drive more meaningful ROI.
Retention
Once you deployed data analytics, you should continuously review the operational infrastructure that delivers services to customers. Are there further opportunities to reduce customer churn? Where in the system is fraudulent behavior occurring and why? How can you recover lost revenue and prevent loss in the future?
Ultimately, to successfully translate your data analytics insights from a noun into a verb, it is imperative to choose a partner with an advanced analytics platform that provides the end-to-end expertise helping you leverage accurate, actionable outcomes that transform your business practices and drive revenue results.