“Driven by Data” 1: Define Your Goals, Save Money, & Harness Insights
“Driven by Data” is a new series with VERSA, helping inform businesses with data.
Prefer to listen? Here’s the article in audio form:
As we head into Q3 of a year that shocked most businesses, it’s a great time to refresh your team on your business strategy. Are you all headed in the same direction? What is your current strategy and how could you have better-informed decision making?
At VERSA, we support clients to make these decisions through a data-driven strategy. So we thought we’d share some learnings and insights for interested readers, as part of a new data-driven strategy series. To begin, let’s look at an example of getting to the heart of a strategy supported by data.
Guiding Principles: (psst same one outlined in SoundHound (Bajorek, 2019))
1. Alignment: Aligning your team’s strategic goals
2. Data: What to collect and analyze. Know what data you need
3. Harness findings for optimization. Learn from your data
In this first article of our 3 part series, we’ll use a real-world example to explain the first principle.
1. Aligning your team’s strategic goals
What are the goals and how do we measure success?
This is a customer service example. Customer service is complicated, there are many end-points involved and complex internal processes often inform directions. We recently had a very insightful discussion about goals for customer service project — our process considers many channels (chat, phone, web, in-person) meaning we tailor specific solutions to client goals.
Overarching goals for this project were about:
1) Clarity on Numbers 💯
2) Saving Money 💰 💸 💎
3) Understanding Your Users 👋 😊
Got similar goals? Let’s unpack data-driven approaches with this real example.
- Clarity on Numbers 💯
How can you know where you’re going, if you don’t know where you’ve been?
Our client needed a digital solution that reduced investment in a variety of areas (customer service staff, customer complaints, operational costs, technical requirements).
Most operational costs were largely unknown, i.e. cost per customer issue/escalation and data about the frequency of use cases. To be able to make operational changes, streamline, and improve the business, we needed these numbers to be able to make better strategy and process improvements.
Without transparency, we would have almost no way of knowing whether a solution improves user experience and cuts costs. We needed to benchmark costs and find which use cases were most common. (Note, not all of these numbers will be shared with you dear reader, but this article gives you these in broad strokes).
2. Saving Money 💰 💸 💎
Where is the most money being spent? Can we change our processes to improve efficiency or save money?
With greater clarity on where the most was being spent, the client could see what costs weren’t serving the business’s bottom line. To find this, we prepare a number of research questions, such as:
- Costs: How much are global operational costs for this product/use case monthly? Annually?
- Meaningful Numbers: What are numbers that represent a meaningful change for the business (i.e. hundreds of dollars, thousands, millions, percentage of difficult product issues)? How much money could we save if we implemented changes?
To bring some playfulness in, I love calculating how many Telsas worth of money we can save clients based on solutions driven by their data. These conversations can be exceptionally eye-opening and provide a greater understanding of the heart of problems of operational efficiencies.
3. Understanding Your Users 👋 😊
We know our users use our product, but anything more specific? What are they doing?
Within their online service and platform, the client found 17 use cases their users were able and wanted to complete online.
Like other clients we’ve talked with, this client collected but did not look at or analyze their data.
So research could play a role in understanding what common user behaviors were, prioritizing the focus of our solution and offering.
For the 17 use cases our client recognized, we found most frequent or infrequent use cases, to see how that affected costs, these were some key intents based on percentages. That’s a bit abstract, so let’s make that more concrete. Say that for this gardening and home decor store (placeholder vertical, not our client’s vertical), some of these use cases could include:
- 1) Compare different flower varieties in an online comparison tool,
- 2) Contact the business to see if they have tulip bulbs in stock,
- 3) Track their daffodil bulbs order, etc.
Key question: Which are the most common use cases customers are using? Of the 17 use cases tagged, which one was the most frequently used by percentage?
2. Driving decisions with this data
Overall, my team at VERSA wanted to work with our client to make sure we were helping to hit those goals and with the numbers were able to measure what success looks like. To ensure we are delivering a return on investment, we need to ask the best data-driven strategic questions such as:
Data-Driven Directions: How can we be more strategic about how we spend money?
Efficiency: How can we save money and make the system more efficient?
Sound familiar? Are these your goals or those of your customers? They are certainly common across many of our clients.
In these times, where services are increasingly online and business models are changing to a more contact-less model, it’s a fantastic opportunity to refresh. Many of our clients at VERSA share these common goals and we enjoy working with them to create data-driven solutions together.
In the second article, we’ll walk through Mari Kondo-ing your data 🙌
We’ll look into an example of how we unpacked our client’s data to harness insights and helped to make informed decisions with confidence. Stay tuned.
