Monday 18 July 2016

Obinna Dike, Citi Professional - How to Get Started with Analytics in Your Business

Obinna Dike has been working with Citi in the United Kingdom and the United States for over five years. He has tremendous experience when it comes to software systems, big data, and business analytics.

The word analytics means discovery, collection, and interpretation of patterns in data.

What data should your business collect? Are you collecting enough data already?

Success of an organization in the marketplace directly depends on the possession of key assets and skills. Therefore, an analysis of strong players in the market will reveal the causes behind a successful track record.
This is how you get started with analytics in business. You don’t start collecting everything. You figure out the parameters that matter, start with them, and expand from there.

These parameters are also known as value elements. Identifying, collecting, and tracking value elements in your marketplace will give you a very deep understanding of the marketplace.

For example, search engines have the following value elements: speed of obtaining results, speed of loading, accuracy of search results, ease of use, visual design, and advanced features.

You can find analytics behind every successful business strategy. You can’t have a strategy if you don’t know what is currently happening in the marketplace, and to know what is happening means to collect a lot of numbers and analyze them.

Everything in the market has competition. Even if the marketplace is empty, you do have competition. Your competition is the absence of a solution, not doing anything about a problem, or not knowing that a solution exists. Unless everybody buys from you, they do have choice. You have to understand what that choice is and collect data to make decisions about your business.

The Role of Analytics and Data in Competitive Intelligence

Many businesses approach the subject of competitive intelligence in the wrong way.

Competitive intelligence is not something you do once. It’s not something you do from time to time because some of your employees have nothing better to do.

Competitive intelligence should be a systematic, ongoing process. It is a gathering and analysis of information about competition, customers, and your marketplace.

The purpose of gathering data should not be data for the sake of data.  The goal of competitive intelligence is to create actionable insights.

What do you measure? First, you measure all numbers such as customer value, conversion rate, and different metrics that show how effective a call center is, and so on.

When it comes to analytics and competitive intelligence, many businesses do not pay enough attention to the opportunity to become a customer of their competitors.

Yes, it is painful to reach into your pocket and give some of your hard-earned money to your competitors. However, this opportunity comes with an unbelievable return on investment. You will be able to see all of the customer promotions and all of the internal marketing that your competitors are doing. You will be able to rip apart their products and dissect their services to get an idea on how to make your products and services better.

You will also be able to see what your competitors are doing after the sale to make the sale stick and to have their existing customers come back and buy again. Hiring professionals like Obinna Dike Citi and building analytics platforms would allow you to integrate all this information into usable reports that create actionable insights to further grow your business.