Data driven growth of Organizations
By: Nihu Gudur
Tags: Employee Engagement, Analytics, Data Driven, Organizational Culture, Experiential Learning

How data should form the basis of 360-degree growth of an Organization

Overview

Growth of an organization is measured from its Performance Results or Annual Statements, which indicate the organization’s Profits or Losses, Operating Margin, YoY growth trends or its position in the market. However, all these parameters are lag indicators of growth, which are an outcome of the performance over a Quarter or a Year. Now over and above these parameters, every organization processes and stores huge quantities of data of various types depending on their line of business. This could be related to customer, sales, marketing, employees, products and services or competition. This article is a view on how organizations could leverage the various types of data available, which serve as lead indicators, for their all-rounded growth

Website analytics to determine the “next new offer”

Most businesses have a website associated, which is used by the customer to understand the products, services and offerings of the business. Implementing analytics on the pages of the website, such as for button clicks, redirects, page navigation, and successful bookings will generate data about what the customer has been looking for and will help the business work on the findings.

For example, if a popular franchise of Spas observes from their website analytics that only 10% of the customers looking at all the services are actually booking an appointment, then they can see if rolling out promotions of 20% discount for a weekend will help increase their bookings. If they do increase, this means the prices are higher than customer expectations and their product catalog needs a revisit.

Similarly, if 80% of the customers visiting a company’s registration site are dropping off post entering User Information, because the site is prompting them to enter credit card information to complete registration, then the company needs to add alternate offerings for a credit card, such as PayPal or maybe even consider excluding credit card information, unless the registration is for a premium membership.

The findings derived from Analytics acts as the “new” Customer Satisfaction Survey.

Defining and measuring business driven Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators are a health card of all processes and applications in the organization. Therefore, it is important that an organization choose its Key Performance Indicators that are a true measure of the performance of the business.

For example, a logistics company’s KPI should be “being able to deliver all packages at the destination on first attempt and within the agreed up on service levels” and not just be “the website of the logistics company being up and running 24x7”. While the latter is important, it is generic and holds well for any active website, whereas the former is specific to their company’s performance.

Similarly, if the process of creating a shipment involves generating a label and creating a pick up /drop off, then the KPI should measure the success of each of the process steps and measure if each of the associated service levels have been met.

Enabling experiential learning based recommendations and implementations

Machine Learning should be implemented on the KPI data as well as the Analytics data to provide recommendations or suggestions internally to the employees managing the products and also to suggest products to the customers.

Based on past success of products launched to market, the offerings of the product, launch dates and similar competition products available or simultaneously launched, time to market for a potential new product should be generated. The implementation plan and resources need to achieve the plan should be derived backwards, thus ensuring correct timing of the market launch and maximum market share for the product.

If a given customer has searched for AAA batteries, which were out of stock, on a retailer’s website the last 3 times they have logged in, the next time they login and the batteries happen to be in stock, there should be a suggestion to add them to the cart. Probably even, offer a 10% discount as the customer has been loyally waiting on the retailer.

Based on the past KPI data and other enablers, customer should be provided with tailored predictions and suggestions, thus ensuring enhanced customer experience. For example, I based on KPI data, if an on road shipment usually takes 3 days instead of 2 days for delivery between Pittsburgh and New York whenever the weather forecast is less than 0 C , then the customer should be provided with that prediction, for example, saying their package might not arrive on time for Christmas.

Similarly, if it has been observed from the past KPI data, that a shipment creation fails whenever the associated pickup fails, then the developer community of the shipment application must be provided with a recommendation to loosely couple shipment application from pickup application. This ensures customer can at least create a label and then decide on if they want to go for a drop off, in case pickup is not available.

Employee Success

Employees are the key assets of any organization and success of any organizations needs each of its employees to be successful. Data can play a key role here too, in enabling an employee to succeed. The goals an employee sets for the year can be used to recommend relevant trainings and workshops, which will help him or her, achieve that goal. Similarly, profile of each employee could be managed and updated, with each goal achieved, training completed and promotions awarded.

Based on an analysis of all such profiles, recommendations could be sent out to aspirant employees on the goals they need to achieve to attain a certain promotion. For example, a recommendation could be sent out to a Junior Manager saying “80% of the employees who got promoted to Senior Manager position in 2019 and 2020 completed the Leadership-Level 3 training and implemented the 7 habits learnt during the training in their projects“

Also depending on the short-term and long-term goal employees set for themselves, relevant projects could be recommended to the employee. For example, if a software developer has set a goal for himself to be a Cloud Architect in the next 5 years, then a role of Software Developer in a project on Cloud Native implementation could be recommended to him or her to get hands-on experience that will help get a step closer to the goal.

Summary

It is necessary in today’s world that every organization imbibes data-driven decision-making, as a part of their work culture, as that implies there is a strong foundation beneath their goals. The examples quoted in this article are only a limited subset of the vast possibility that could be explored. Depending on the type of business and the categories of data available, several analyses and inferences could be derived that serve as effective lead indicators for decision-making and execution, in turn ensuring a profitable and sustainable organization.