by Susan Walsh, President and CEO, Sales-Link, Inc.
These days, there are many good articles out there, each advising you on different approaches to handling your company’s data analytics: the do’s and do not’s; the best practices; the best tools…and on and on it goes. Some of you will spend hours reading, and then become overwhelmed and confused about which tool you should be using, how, and why.
Well, I say relax a bit, and first spend time getting an understanding of how the data your company produces is used to help your employees and your customers.
Once you decide how the data helps each of your users, i.e., employees or customers, you can then begin to determine what the data can tell you. Monitor employee productivity by group, and by function. Think about what the mission of each group is, and how data can measure performance, output, and results.
Customer Satisfaction is overall most important to every company’s mission. Looking at your customers’ requests will give you a starting point of what data is most important to them. From there, you can evaluate how you are doing based on the voice of your customer, to decide how often the data is reviewed, and what formats of the data whether in tables, listings or graphs will be most pleasing to your customers.
My advice is to get comfortable with the data your company is generating. It is your data and you have to become one with it. Look at it often---meaning daily--so that you begin to find the routine touch points you want to be kept abreast of each morning, evening, week or month. Daily check-ins allow you to make comparisons from one day to the next; one month to another; and then year to year.
Also, ask your staff to become more involved in looking at their department-level data at a micro level. Each department has a similar goal, i.e., to understand their data. The differences are in how their specific data helps to grow the business. Every person in your company has a piece that fits into the big puzzle.
Congratulations are in order when all your processes are in place and your data puzzle is complete, because the prize is a consistent macro look at your company from a data perspective. This wealth of information will guide your company to great heights if you apply the knowledge it gives you correctly.