We aren’t meeting current expectations. How do we change that?

In today’s market, customer expectations are high, and competition breathes heavy down your neck. Meeting customer expectations isn’t enough. Rather, to gain a competitive edge, you have to anticipate what customers want – even before they know. The key to doing so rests with harnessing the potential of analytics.

As a CEO, you feel the pressure to enhance innovation and create a competitive advantage. Step one is to ensure that you are meeting current expectations, and step two is to use data analytics to help you predict future demand.

How Analytics and Data Can Help You Meet Current Expectations and Stay Competitive

Analytics provides the vital information you need to meet and exceed current expectations. Employing descriptive/diagnositc, predictive and prescriptive analysis can help you foresee your customers’ needs. As a result, you will meet current expectations and compete well with other companies within your industry.

Here is additional detail on the types of analytics that can help you meet customer expectations.

Descriptive and Diagnostic

Descriptive analytics detail the past and explain current situation – what are people buying at what price and at what time. This data can spark questions to look at influences – changes in the season or weather, market factors, financial performance trends, and even things like sports team wins can all be descriptors for customer needs and actions. Evaluating current and past behavior is the first phase of meeting customer expectations and understanding where innovation or additional support could have the most impact.

Predictive

Using past results and relating them to current elements, predictive analytics can help you forecast future outcomes. A growing set of predictive analytics leverage innovative techniques such as machine learning.

The leading indicators and forecasts produced from these techniques could include anticipating when a customer might make a purchase, which service has the most significant future potential or what price point would increase sales volume. Predictive analytics can enhance your purchasing, production, delivery, and customer service and help you test options before committing resources into full-fledged production.

Prescriptive

Prescriptive analytics helps you decide on the best action to take to reach a particular business goal. It helps you optimize for the biggest impact (increased profit margin, revenue, or reduction in error rates, etc.) and which specific actions to take. For instance, a car company might create a data-driven model to understand how environmental regulations will affect production and impact sales. This kind of analytics will advise the car company the best features to incorporate which will meet the legislative requirements, meet customers’ expectations and optimize revenue.

The Significance of Having the Right Data and Analytics Talent

Innovation isn’t about unbridled creativity. It really is about focused efforts which solve a defined problem. Analytics is key to making sure the problem is properly defined, testing is statistically sound, and recommendations are analyzed prior to implementation — against multiple business measures. However, without the right talent to drive the analytics efforts and to interpret the data, you will not gain the full benefits and optimize performance.

Today, more and more businesses are investing in their analytics operations, both in new technologies and in new talent. The talent additions may be as permanent staff, or professionals source for specific project needs who help companies with specific initiatives.

Chisel Analytics can find the right data science and analytics talent to help you grow a strong analytics team. Chisel vets top talent with our proprietary skill assessments across 6 key elements to ensure you hire the most qualified analyst for your critical needs. We ensure that the addition is seamless, giving your company the efficiency and reliability you need from your workforce, allowing you to innovate in alignment with customer demands.