Are you making the most of your business data during this crisis?

During the current crisis, every business has been affected in some way. Some businesses are flourishing because they provide a product or service that is in great demand at the moment. Others are struggling, with literally thousands of businesses being shut down completely, unable to trade. No matter which side of the spectrum your business falls, there are challenges to face and its more than likely that there are higher priorities than checking in on your data.

However, a recent survey by Dresner Advisory Services’ shows that their respondents have a strong belief that data-driven decision making is a must-have for their businesses to survive and start to grow again once the crisis is over.

So, how do you become a data-driven business, even during a crisis?

1. Understand your KPI’s

Many businesses will have a set of key performance indictors (KPI’s), most likely around 5, that will tell them how the business is performing. If your business doesn’t have a set of KPI’s then you should be defining them now, even if your business isn’t able to trade at the moment.

It is important to understand what your KPI’s say and how they are changing over time to understand what is really happening in your business. Even if you’re not trading at full capacity your KPI’s should always be up to date.

Top Tip: Tracking too many KPI's will result in not knowing where to focus.

2. What are your drivers of growth or decline?

Knowing what your KPI’s are saying and how they are changing is one thing but understanding what is driving them will allow you will be able to make changes and adapt.

For example, you may have a KPI focussed on Twitter interactions, and you see that you have less interaction that you have before. The first question is why? So, understanding that you have tweeted less during the crisis may be a contributing factor, and tweeting more may be the resolution. If you don’t have a secondary report showing you how your tweets have changed, then you may never know that was a potential driver.

Top Tip: Effective visualisation of your data will allow you to see the key data points easier.

3. Action what you’ve learned.

Once you know what needs to change, either positively or negatively, then you actually need to do something about it. Making a change based on your data is at the heart of being data driven and the part that many businesses fail to do successfully.

Once you’ve made the change you can see whether it has made the impact you were looking for. If not, change back. If it did, then accelerate the change to accelerate the impact.

Top Tip: Once you have made a change based on your data analysis, don't forget to track its effect.

Conclusion.

Using your data to adapt to the current situation is going to be key to helping grow your business once the crisis is over. Consumer behaviours will have changed, new habits will have been formed. Make sure your business knows what changes to make.

Don’t let your data just be a nice to know.

Track it. Action it.

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If you want to know more about how Sontai can help your business effectively manage and track your KPI's and their drivers, book some time with me to chat through what you would like to achieve with your data.