Sometimes, some businesses, especially small business think that it’s not important to think about data at the start. However, the data and analytics guru Bernard Marr said, “I firmly believe that big data and its implications will affect every single business—from Fortune 500 enterprises to mom and pop companies—and change how we do business, inside and out.” From that, we can conclude that the customer’s data is truly significant when we are doing business, whether it’s a big business or not. It’s a tool to get your business successful and need to tag along with a good team decisiveness, hard work, and consistency.

 

We already know that data is important for our business, but why? First, it’s because the data that we got from our research can help us learn about our customers’ usual routines when buying a product or anything else. As an example, we could know which product that is most selling and need to be restocked, we can include a new way of purchasing, like using financial technology such as e-wallet, etc. from the data that we gather, we can make a better decision which plan that we need to come up to upgrade our company that makes customers want to choose our company than the others and that can make our company get new customers, increase customer retention, improve customer service, better manage marketing efforts, track social media interaction, and predict sales trends.

 

Second, it can help to solve our company problems and let us improve our business process. Data help us pinpoint performance breakdowns so we can understand and know which steps need to be optimized and which are performing well. As an example, when we are advertising our products, we choose to advertise it with television as a mediator. However, it’s not increasing your sales and when we looked at the data, we could know that our customers aren’t watching tv but prefer to watch youtube. From there on, we tried to advertise our products from youtube and it increases our sales. This kind of solution is needed to keep our company running.

 

Third, data also helps us track down our company performance, by doing this, we can compare one performance with the other and measure our company’s success. Data let us know whether our money is being put to good use or not. For example, we and our teams think that offline store is doing better than the online store because more customer came and bought products, meanwhile when we looked at the data that we got, we could see that our online store is having a higher percentage of a successful transaction and bring more profits than the offline store.

In addition, data made us understand our customers, our markets, and our competitors better. Data makes it easier to understand our customers and how to reach them. Even the PayPal Co-Founder Max Levchin pointed out, “The world is now awash in data and we can see consumers in a lot clearer ways.

 

There are 3 types of data that we can get, descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive and there are several factors to analyze the data that we got, such as product design, customer surveys, industry trends, customer support, etc. Each data let us know different things and also have different impacts, that’s why we can easily get lost in data if we aren’t careful enough.

In sum, it’s really important for a business to collect data and to get to know the importance of data that they got, especially in this rapid-growing era and the customers as the centric. We need to understand why the data is important, how to get data that we need, what we can get from the data that we got, and so on. When we understood the importance of data, we could know that growing our business with data easier to do.

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