Experts Discuss Benefits Business Intelligence Data Science

Data is everything in marketing. It enables you to make better-informed decisions, avoid making bad decisions, and fine-tune your testing. And that's only a handful of the benefits.

Curious about what alternative benefits there might be to using business customer intelligence and data science, we asked numerous experts:

"What are the key business benefits of having a highly developed business customer intelligence and data science system?"

The MarTechExec takeaway

Whether you're looking to make predictions, improve your customer relations, or focus in on the data that matters most - business customer intelligence and data science can do wonders for your data efforts. Oh, and automate it if you can.

As a marketing technology executive for both Fortune 500 companies and startups, she is passionate about helping marketing technology professionals stay on top of their game. Lana is the executive editor of martechexec.com - a place to learn, share and discuss marketing technology topics and solutions.

The expert eakeaways

• You can figure out which data actually matters
• Make better decisions. Ignore your gut.
• It helps you help your customers.
• It speeds up the decision process
• Analytics turns data to info and info to gold

The experts

• William Buist
• Tracey Van Puyvelde
• Tuval Chomut
• John L Myers
• Adriana Beal
• Elle Morgan
• Irit Eizips
• Irina Peregud
• Shane Lynn
• Ali Rebaie
• Kristian Keep

You can figure out which data actually matters

The best businesses look carefully at their clients. They hear what their customers say directly to them about their products or services. They also analyse what they do, say, and act when in other situations. In those behaviours, sentiments and activities they can evidence and validate the conclusions drawn from listening.

Behavioural data is important but can be hard to discern and is heavily situation dependent; Sentiment data can be misleading; Activity data can be hard to understand out of context.

Analytics must therefore not just be mechanically performed but must be interpreted, validated and tested.  When  that is done well it provides a clear baseline to measure the impact of future changes.  Companies that measure well tend to perform well too."

"A highly-developed analytics system gives an organization superpowers, the core of which is visibility and insight. Data exists EVERYWHERE! When that data is off in its own tower, your organization is making blind-based decisions.

Connecting the towers together allows you to see relationships and track your lead management flow, in real-time! A plethora of benefits follow, including:

• Quick reaction time and lightning fast decision making. Know if your sales drop this month is related to sales team changes, decreasing marketing efforts, seasonality, prices increases/updates and more.
• Time reduction and cost reduction. Time is not the only cost consideration. There is also an expensive opportunity cost when quick and correct decisions can not be made because the right information is not available at the right time...
• Maximize efficiency, increase data integrity and promote teamwork. I’ve heard this said from a marketing department at the early stage of an analytics system implementation: “All the analytics system did was reveal our data integrity issues.”

If you were doing something wrong, would you want someone to tell you so you could correct it? I would! As an organization, it’s frustrating to make changes, but it doesn’t compare to the downfall when you don’t.

Implementing an analytics system forces all departments to work in sync, identify issues as they occur, and maximize the organization’s reporting accuracy for maximum efficiency.”

Make better decisions. Ignore your gut.

“Businesses still rely heavily on human experience and intuition to map out ways for improving the online journey, but, as a recent article in Harvard Business Review put it: ‘If companies want to get value from their data, they need to focus on accelerating human understanding of data.’ Today, many businesses use generic data sets and data science practices to draw out business-specific and even sector-specific trends. A highly developed analytics system can help enhance productivity and performance. At the end of the day, a person can only analyse so much data in a day; but, if a powerful analytics system can do that for them, and give insights from the data for the person to interpret, it’s a game-changer. That’s what Clicktale’s experience analytics does, it combs through the data, and gives you what you need to make informed decisions in real-time.

A highly developed analytics system can help enhance productivity and performance. At the end of the day, a person can only analyse so much data in a day; but, if a powerful analytics system can do that for them, and give insights from the data for the person to interpret, it’s a game-changer. That’s what Clicktale’s experience analytics does, it combs through the data, and gives you what you need to make informed decisions in real-time.”

“You can enable your organization's data-driven culture and operate your business strategy based on information and analysis as opposed to ‘gut feel.’

Organizations who make this type of investment can better operate on the influx of data and information from online sources, mobile apps, sensors and social media.

Organizations who do not... well they will be forced to use backward facing or following indicators to operate their business.”

“A cornucopia of value is available for any business interested in building smarts into their systems via data analytics.

When implemented correctly, analytics systems can have a large impact on how businesses make decisions and on the company’s bottom line.

The more you know about the hidden patterns and relationships in your data, the better the decisions you can make to optimize customer experience, production, scheduling and inventory in the supply chain, and more.

The secret to achieving massive impact from your analytics initiative is simple: let the effort be driven by business outcomes rather than technology.”

“Data is the lifeblood of any company. With a highly developed customer analytics system, employees across the organization are able to make fast and informed decisions that are backed by real-time, unified data.

The impact is felt company-wide both internally and in an organization's ability to deliver more personalized and relevant customer experiences.

A comprehensive customer analytics solutions maps the end-to-end customer journey, from the moment an individual hears about your brand to their ongoing engagement and growth with your organization.

Rather than thinking of analytics in terms of product, marketing, sales or support - a modern solution should think about analytics in terms of the total experience user's have with your brand, regardless of function or department.

In doing so, employees will be able to identify unseen opportunities to optimize and improve with the customer at the core of every business decision.”

It helps you help your customers.

"Nowadays, most companies have at least one service or product that is sold through a subscription based model. However, with this increasing adoption of this business model, many organizations find that the traditional sales and services model is no longer enough to ensure profitability.

To be successful, subscription-based businesses foster a value-based approach to managing their accounts.

Account managers are expected to reach out to their clients proactively and discuss opportunities to add value, based on what they know about the client. To do that efficiently and effectively, it is key to develop robust business analytics system.

There are many benefits to investing in a highly developed business analytics system. One key benefit is the creation of a central view of customer data that is made accessible across the organization. Another benefit is an accurate view of the customer interactions, contract details, products and service packages purchased, renewal dates, support ticket trends, survey results, etc...

Thereby, a highly developed business analytics system empowers customer success teams to be more proactive and efficient in driving value and growth.

This is a common outcome, since customer success managers are able to improve every interaction with their clients  through insight-driven recommendations that a business analytics systems automatically produces.

They are also able to produce a customer segmentation analysis which can be used to identify the most valuable customers and establish a customized plan based on a range of parameters.

Overall, organizations that invest in business analytics systems are in a much better position to succeed in retaining customers, securing growth and increasing customer satisfaction.”

“A developed data analytics system can become a competitive advantage for organizations from every industry.

Companies that pursue analytics and data strategies outperform their competitors by establishing better relationships with customers, reacting to buying trends in the market in a timely manner, finding new revenue opportunities and identifying patterns to mitigate fraudulent activity.

The speed of analytics can also become a competitive advantage. Most companies use analytics, many of them can act on data from months, weeks, or even days ago, but very few of them can respond to changes minute by minute.

Real-time analytics is helping companies reduce latency in decision-making and business processes.

Applying new powerful technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning not just to a company’s operations but also to its products and services is a higher level of analytics adoption.

The smart AI-driven products attract customers through a completely new user experience. Natural language user interface allows customers to interact with a product in a natural way.

Machine learning enables personalized suggestions for products to buy and recommendations for content to watch.

This became a reality thanks to recent technology advancements and the first companies to adopt the technologies will prosper in the new data economy.”