How To Start Leveraging Your Underutilized Data Assets

Most organizations that are marching ahead in their data journey have invested in a variety of tools and technologies. These tools are used to analyze data to arrive at a decision, and those decisions lead to different outcomes. But imagine if there was a way to reverse this process. What if you could start with the outcome, determine what decisions you need to make to arrive at this outcome, and then choose the data you must act on? 

Not All The Data You Have Is Important, Relevant, Or Needed!

Let’s face it. There is so much data being generated from so many different devices, processes, and people today. But not all of it is clean, useful, or significant. Unfortunately, not many organizations realize this. Data is wonderful, but it can also be very useless. Let’s take an example. 

Imagine you have tools in place that act on customer service data to analyze their past behavior, determine their current preferences, and assess their future needs. But a lot of this data is very transactional. From product information to price details, invoices to returns, and more.

Although it is important to collect all this data, most of it is deadweight and might never generate relevant business outcomes. Investing in cloud solutions to store this humongous volume of data and then allocating a skilled team of data scientists to unearth value is not only futile but also extremely costly.

There is also another side to this. Customers interact with brands today via many different channels. If you make your decisions only based on the data from one channel, say your customer service desk in this scenario, you might never get your hands on data that is being generated from other channels — for instance, your social media interactions or website chat, or your sales executives. 

Ignoring these underutilized but extremely critical data assets can lead to skewed decisions, which can eventually impact customer experience and loyalty. The data tools you use cannot help you solve everything unless you have a very specific purpose. Even if the data is relevant or useful, it is also timebound. 

If you are still using your tools to analyze customer data from a year ago when, in fact, you have data at your disposal from a month ago – the decisions you make and the outcomes you generate would not be accurate. Your customer base has likely evolved in the past year, and their preferences and behaviors have changed, eventually invalidating your data set. 

Separating Noise From Meaning Is Key

When you have billions of bytes of customer data, millions of transactions, thousands of data points, and hundreds of attributes, using your data tools on all this data could be useless. An enormous amount of time (and resources) is required to pre-process this data and make it usable for training machine learning models. 

In today’s world of amazing customer experiences, separating noise from meaning becomes crucial. You need to develop customer insights for the whole journey. Focusing on siloed interactions and one-time transactions will never help you in painting a picture of the whole experience.

When there is so much data at hand, you need to:

• First, evaluate what you have in terms of data (and information) and identify assets that would lead you to your desired outcomes. 
• Identify untapped data sources that are a treasure trove of information and uncover useful ways to build a competitive advantage.
• Make a connection between the information you have and the actions you can take with that data to drive specific business outcomes. 
• Invest in data quality tools that can help you cleanse data and ensure the trustworthiness and accountability of data assets. 

The EnFuse Advantage 

With the volume of data flowing from different sources (customers, products, sales, and vendors) constantly growing, it has become imperative for businesses to efficiently manage and maintain this data and leverage analytics to make decisions and take actions to realize desired business outcomes. 

At EnFuse Solutions, we approach data as a strategic asset that can drive better decision-making and business outcomes. By assembling the right team, developing a data management system, and using analytics to extract meaningful insights, we unlock the full potential of data assets and achieve better business outcomes. 

We help businesses identify data that is important while also improving its accuracy, integrity, and quality. Instead of simply collecting and analyzing millions of data points, we work with organizations to understand the results they are looking to drive. 

For example, we can:

• Help you identify the outcomes you want to achieve, such as reducing operational costs or improving customer engagement.
• Work backward to identify the data assets and analysis needed to support that objective.

Alternatively, we can help you evaluate your existing data assets and identify opportunities for improvement, then work forward to identify the outcomes you can achieve by leveraging that data. We then work our way back to list down decisions that would lead to those outcomes and accordingly collect and analyze data. 

By capturing high-quality data and resolving gaps and errors along the way, we help you ensure your actions are tied to desired outcomes. We leverage technology to ensure data is available in real-time to expedite critical business decisions and accelerate growth.

We also make sure to identify underutilized data assets and glean as much value from them as possible. Explore our range of analytics and decision support services to seamlessly integrate, transform, and improve data and use it to make the right decisions and drive the right outcomes.