Data has become an increasingly invaluable resource for any modern business, and if properly managed and analysed, can reveal a lot of helpful insight on customer patterns, market trends, and the rate at which a business is growing. Businesses have been quick on the uptake and now actively use data to improve their services and deliver better offerings to customers.
But data in and of itself is not enough, and too many entrepreneurs without sufficient knowledge of proper data management end up sitting on a wealth of data instead of actually making it work for them. Lack of data management know-how, the tediousness of data cataloguing, and issues like incomplete and duplicate data are just some of the contemporary data management challenges that plague business owners and prevent them from maximising their revenue potential.
To that end, here’s a quick overview on what proper data management entails and exactly how it can improve your business’s bottom line.
The Importance of Storage in Data Management
Businesses generate a ton of data each day. This data could come from a variety of sources: from online transactions made by customers, from engagement on their online accounts, from their own content that they’ve uploaded and shared online, from their own employees answering customer queries, and so on. There will come a point where it will be urgent to better store, organise, and analyse all this data, especially with regard to keeping the business safe. That’s why the data storage aspect of data management is a particularly important one.
In its wider context, data management pertains to any processes, tools, and strategies employed to collect, store, and categorise data. Given how these data most likely contain sensitive information as well, your business should also take the right security measures to ensure your data won’t be hacked or stolen by cyber criminals.
Accomplishing this would require investing in robust storage solutions with sufficient capacity and features needed to handle all your data. You could choose a physical server or a cloud service such as HPE GreenLake. Having your data safely stored away will make it easier for you to analyse it later on for relevant business insight, which should form the core of your decision-making.
How Proper Data Management Can Increase Your Business Revenue
Beyond properly organising and storing your data, you should know how to use it for the right purposes. As an entrepreneur, you should make it your priority to utilise your data for the following aspects of doing business:
1) Understanding Your Customers Better
The data that you’ve collected can be key to understanding your customers’ needs better, which in turn should enable you to improve your services to increase customer satisfaction. This can also help you create a more personal shopping experience for them. For example, based on what they last purchased from your online store, you may use your data to recommend other items that they may like as well.
Great service brings in more business, and customers are more likely to patronise a business if they receive what they regard as a holistic customer experience that honours the littlest details. This also bolsters customer loyalty, which will form an important part of your bottom line. Customer data analytics at this calibre will only be possible with good data management practices, so make sure you invest in solutions that will allow you to store, manoeuvre, and analyse your customer data precisely and thoroughly.
2) Making Better Business Decisions
Your data can also help you make better decisions when it comes to introducing innovations to your business. Information on market trends, sales forecasts, and customer behaviour can all be crucial in deciding whether your next business idea will be worth investing in or not.
Better management of your data can also clue you in on whether your business is profitable at this point in time and help you pinpoint exactly where its weak points are. A solid data foundation is also necessary for improving your business performance through technological upgrades, like an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven workflow. If you’re based in or operate in a country like Singapore, it’s imperative that you know how to consolidate your data towards equipping your business for the age of AI.
3) Improving Efficiency in Daily Operations
Your improvements at data management should also result in improvements for various processes in your daily operations, all towards ensuring that things flow more smoothly and that the business saves time and resources.
If you can refine your management of your inventory data, as well as your data on product demand patterns, this will allow you to plan ahead more efficiently when ordering supplies. In turn, it will be easier for your business to meet customer demands without delay. Moreover, with the insight gathered from previous stocking patterns, you’ll be less at risk of ordering too much in terms of supply, which may otherwise end up gathering dust or even expiring.
4) Increasing Productivity among Employees
Having a well-organised and comprehensible system for managing your data can also increase the productivity of your employees. With business data readily available to them, your employees will be able to respond to customer queries quickly and with better accuracy.
Your consolidated data can even be used to train AI-powered chatbots that can answer simple questions round the clock, thus freeing up your employees to attend to more complex tasks. Ultimately, it will allow you to optimise your manpower and focus on growing your business.
Now that we’re fully in the digital age, the data in your possession is crucial towards setting your business on a path of success. Make sure you’re equipped with the right data management tools and are constantly learning about best practices for data management so that you can truly get the most value out of your data.