Every day, dozens of decisions must be made in your business, ranging from major strategic or financial considerations to minor decisions. While it’s important to trust your instincts when making these choices (especially when it comes to lunch), many of them have the potential to directly impact your company’s overall success. Your instincts are certainly a big part of the decision-making equation, but with so much at stake and great advancements in technology at your disposal, there’s no reason to rely solely on intuition.

The Value of Data-Driven Decision Making

The internet has given us several gifts in just a few decades, but the one that has had a significant impact on the way we do business is the ability to make wiser decisions through the use of big data. In the last ten years, more data has been created than in the entire history of humanity. As a result, there is a wealth of information from which to draw when making important decisions.

How Data Helps Your Business Make Better Decisions

Despite acknowledging the vast amounts of data available, you may not realize how it affects virtually every aspect of your business. So let’s take a closer look. Here are four areas in your organization where data-driven decisions can make a significant difference.

Customer Support

86% of consumers are willing to spend more to have a great customer experience when doing business with a company. This makes customer support crucial.

Considering how much customer data is currently available, it is one of the easiest areas to leverage data. You can use it to listen to online discussions to gauge demand or complaints, track brand mentions, follow client behavior and anticipate their needs, and more. This helps provide clients with the service they desire.

Sales

You can use data to track and evaluate your pipeline and determine where you are losing the most leads. The correct data assists you in identifying viable opportunities and determining which leads are worth pursuing.

Marketing

Listening to and understanding your customers is the essence of marketing. As a result, data from search engines and social media can help you acquire valuable insights into your consumer base—for example, their social media preferences, online behaviors, or interests and hobbies.

This information helps you tailor your campaigns accordingly. You can track the success of your marketing efforts as they go live and use that data to evaluate what you need to improve.

Finance

To maximize output, you need data to better understand how successful your business is and highlight which areas may be facing challenges. Decision management is crucial in finance. Data-driven decisions help you make better projections and forecasts and meet expectations.

Managing Your Data

When it comes to managing data, it is easier said than done. Trying to keep up with the never-ending reports from multiple departments is a full-time job in and of itself, forcing many firms to choose between data insights and actual output. This is where business intelligence (BI) solutions that are custom-tailored to your needs come in.

Why not take advantage of the data that is already available and make data-driven decisions today? If you are not taking advantage of the data tide, you can be sure that your competitors are.

At Pahappa, we build custom solutions that help teams of all sizes spend less time processing data using spreadsheets and more time creating data-driven strategies.