Facts and figures, statistics, points of comparison: data is collected, and then (hopefully) stored in a place where information can be understood and better business decisions made, which in turn brings more business to your company.
The central goal is to always harness data for impact but sorting through as much processed information can become overwhelming for any business. Hundreds of thousands of data points can be accessed on any given day making it difficult to sift through the noise and find what matters for your business and your customers.
This is where creativity with your data is key. Understanding your data is the first key point, but as a business how do you communicate those key points out in a creative and meaningful way for your customers?
Spark Creativity
In the book Chart Spark: Harness your Creativity in Data Communication to Stand Out and Innovate, the author, Alli Torban, points to asking pointed questions to draw out this creativity from data. While the book is geared towards sparking ideas towards data visualizations- some of the prompts she uses can be useful to apply in thinking about your own data potential.
Torban points to the CTR prompt as one way to generate ideas.
Start with an obvious observation about your business, and ask:
- “What’s the Conflict here?”
- “What makes this Timely?”
- “What’s a possible Resolution to the issue? What actions can we take beyond this?”
Let’s use the example of a business that has a points or rewards system, but no customers seem to sign up for it. How do you get potential reward members to sign up?
- Observation: Business X is not able to secure rewards members.
- Conflict: Being a rewards member ultimately gives customers an advantage of saving money and gaining points that can be applied for discounts, but Business X can’t seem to effectively convince customers of the advantage.
- Timely: Business X rewards’ system saves individuals money, and given the current inflation rates: who doesn’t want to save money?
- Resolution: Business X can look to certain data like
- When are customers engaging more with the business, are there peak points? Could it make sense to run promotions during that time?
- How many customers engage with the Rewards section of Business X’s website? Might it be a location issue?
- How long does it take an average person to sign up for the Rewards system? If it takes too long, this may mean that it’s too complicated and will need to be reworked.
Putting all these together Business X may decide that if at checkout they say: “click here and get $2 off and be a part of our rewards program” this may solve the issue. Customers will have already filled out their personal information, making it easier to sign up and streamlines the process. A win-win for both.
This solution came about because the business took a perspective shift and acted in the eyes of a customer by using the data available to them.
This process makes you go beyond the surface-level data. You have to dig deeper and ask questions to find a meaningful data story, and be open to understanding what story does the data tell you.
Using the Unusable
The amount of data that goes unused is baffling. According to recent statistics, 68% of data goes untapped in business. Asking questions with the CTR method could help draw out data that has been discarded as irrelevant, but could actually be leveraged for your business aspirations in other, creative ways.
Ignoring data is a huge faux-pas in the modern business world. Greater clarity for your business, begins with data. As author Steve Lohr puts it in his book Data-ism, “Data is the input, and the output is smarter choices and wiser judgements.” The power of data is not to be underestimated.
dbSeer’s COSR Method
Doing this on your own can be overwhelming, but dbSeer can help you with building out your initial data strategy. We pride ourselves on always looking through the eyes of our customers, and seeing what would be most useful for their company to flourish as digitalization continues to grow.
We combine our technology and industry knowledge to help your business make decisions that have impact and bring order to your business and help draw out meaning from your data.
At dbSeer our own version of the CTR method is COSR. When we work with a client, we analyze the Customer, the Opportunity to help, the Solutions we can bring and provide Results.
For example, working with a full-service independent global valuation firm we helped simplify their business.
We analyzed:
The Customer: The firm had both domestic and international clients, and focused on providing valuations and advisory services to provide accurate and customized view of the value of a business.
The Opportunity: The firm created over 12,000 reports of different data sets for different clients a year. One of their clients requested a standardized, digitized format with a number of specific data points. The firm therefore wanted to deliver this request, and build out a data warehouse to consolidate data and provide this service for future clients as well. This meant needing to provide a way for reviewing reports more efficiently and consolidating everything more seamlessly.
The Solution: dbSeer answered to the firm’s needs and designed and delivered a sophisticated and secure cloud-based data ingestion and transformation pipeline on AWS native services and an analytics-ready data warehouse.
The Results: Higher productivity for the firm as well as the potential to achieve higher market competitiveness with increased digitization.
dbSeer asks the necessary questions to think outside the box. We believe in bringing a creative element to the work we do. Inquire today about building out your data strategy and bringing creativity to your data.
If further interested, our case studies further highlight this approach.
