Many companies find it difficult to achieve a strong, data-driven culture and aren’t using data as the basis for their decision making. While there are many challenges involved in making this shift internally, there are numerous benefits that will help make the efforts and investment worthwhile. Many of these revolve around gaining a better understanding of your customers’ needs, preferences, and behaviours, in order to effectively optimise and deliver personalised solutions.

Here are four key benefits of becoming a data-driven organisation and ensuring that data is at the core of your decision making process.

4 Benefits of Becoming Data-Driven

1. Gaining Better Insights on Customers With a Single Customer View

A single customer view (SCV) refers to having all the data you hold about each of your customers consolidated into a single, easy to read record in your database. Having such a complete view of customers and where they’re at in regards to your business provides better insight into the relevance of your services, by virtue of the way customers are interacting with each of them. This can play a huge role in personalisation of content based on each user’s needs but also for segments of users with a similar profile, ultimately leading to better marketing, sales and retention.

In order to achieve the creation of a SCV, it relies heavily on customer data being combined from multiple departments and channels. By collecting, checking, cleansing and improving all available customer information, this can then be combined into one record and provide a 360 degree view of each and every customer.

2. Understanding Broader Trends Through Segmentation and Visualisation of Critical Data

The ability to segment and visualise data is a great method by which decision makers can discover particular patterns. Segmentation allows groups of entities to be broken down into multiple groups, perhaps by age, gender, or other differentiating factors. This in turn makes it easier to identify if certain customers are being targeted for the correct product types and if some customers would be better suited to other marketing channels.

Mapping progression or using visual aids, such as a pie chart, as a way to understand sales figures or trends is referred to as visualisation. It’s crucial to invest in digital solutions which offer this functionality, as it helps to get across your intended message much more easily.

Although gaining insight into the behaviour of individual customers is important, there are times when you need to aggregate data and group users into common segments to gain a greater understanding of broader trends within your data. Segmentation is another key capability of many analytics platforms that can provide significant value to your organisation.

Dashboard capabilities also make it easy for users without any IT experience to view and interpret data. This helps to provide a summary of the overall performance of a website, while also enabling a deeper dive into Page, Asset and People analysis. They can also be used for a number of configuration and workspace management tasks.

3. Optimising User Experience by Conducting A/B Testing 

Understanding users both individually and within segments helps to optimise content and services based on their preferences. This can be done via A/B testing, which allows you to test the content you want to display to groups of users, such as different headlines or images on landing pages. Monitoring and analysing results from A/B testing allows you to determine which variations drive the most conversions, therefore allowing ongoing optimisation and improved performance.

Furthermore, analytics needs to be a continuous feedback loop. This involves collecting and analysing data, making informed decisions and turning them into assumptions, followed by testing these assumptions. If the assumptions prove correct, then the new behaviour should be adopted.

4. Enhancing Web Performance Based on Page Insights 

Page analytics is a common feature across many web analytics tools, providing visibility into actions taken by users of your website such as interactions with posts and clicks to different pages. This helps to provide a greater level of understanding of how certain web pages and content types are performing as well as how they’re being received by users.

However, many web analytics tools don't provide insights into how users interact with individual components or subsections of pages. That's where Liferay Analytics Cloud can help your business.

You are also able to gain insights into forms through Liferay Analytics Cloud to monitor drop-off rates which can help with further optimisation of processes. If there are forms with low completion rates, this can be investigated to determine potential areas of improvement. For example, some forms may ask the wrong type of questions or simply too many questions to retain user interest. With this capability, potential issues can be easily identified and forms can continuously be optimised to maximise completion rates.

Ready to Become a Data-Driven Organisation?

With increasingly large quantities of data, there’s significant potential for companies to derive insights and apply them to make more informed decisions. Gaining a better understanding of customer preferences and behaviour allows for constant optimisation to improve customer experience and overall levels of satisfaction.

To stand out against competitors, find out how you can enhance your digital strategy with Liferay Analytics Cloud, using data about your target audience and the performance of your company’s many touch points. This solution helps businesses to overcome existing data silos and provide essential personalised experiences.