In our blog series focused on understanding your customer, we covered the first step focused on finding and understanding your data sources and building rapport with key stakeholders, followed by the second step of identifying the big question your organization wants to answer.
The next step is to get your data in order. Data relevancy, accuracy and integrity are crucial to understanding your customer. Clean, organized data will help your organization effectively interpret customer information to build strategic plans that propel your business.
How can you get your data in order?
- Collate your data from all disparate sources inside your organization (sales, customer service) as well as outside your organization (ad agencies) in order to glean valuable insights from your raw data.
- Identify technical resources in your organization (data architects) and build relationships with them. They are integral in making data integration happen.
- Determine the best data solution fit such ascloud infrastructure or local data-marts and execute a small proof-of-concept data project; it will serve as the first analysis and will answer 80% of IT data requirement questions needed to build your final solution.
- Incorporate relevant data inputs from important customer touch points (e.g., social and web site analytics); however, don’t throw everything in but the kitchen sink; too much data will add complications and drain your time and resources. Your data points should support your big question(s).
Organizing and understanding your customer data is not a small feat, it requires collaboration, uniformity across platforms, data integration and process improvement methodology to successfully help your business make smart decisions.
What challenges or obstacles do you face to get your data organized?
Stay tuned for our next post which will outline the fourth and final step in your analytics journey, or download this white paper designed to help you understand how to turn your raw data into accessible, actionable insights from virtually any source within your organization. Get started today!
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