Proper data management is essential for every organization. Data management comprises a wide array of functions and processes related to capturing, storing, organizing and maintaining the huge volumes of data that organizations collect. Analyzing and leveraging this data essential to make key decisions based on it and gain competitive advantage. This, in turn, depends on having quality data for analytics. Moreover, data is the crux of digital transformation. Today, most businesses rely on outsourced solutions such as data mining, data cleansing, and data entry and document scanning services for capturing information and improving its quality. These tools help capture data quickly and effectively from multiple channels. When information is up-to-date, organized and accessible, it can be mined to uncover valuable information, and used to solve business problems and gain customer insights.
Data Management Systems to gain Customer Insights
The starting point of a data-first approach is having a proper data management system (marrinadecisions.com). Here are 4 types of data managements systems for storing data on customers and business processes:
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Systems: This refers to all the techniques, strategies, tools and technologies used for developing, engaging and retaining customers. The database houses customer data sources such as personal data, sales opportunities, sales conversion data, and revenue data. There are many types of CRM systems to help with sales, marketing and service management.
- Marketing technology systems: These platforms allow you to present customized marketing campaigns for target audiences, assess the success of these strategies, and then use that data to develop future campaigns.
- Data warehouse systems: The data warehouse is the basic customer data repository. Data warehouse systems make data mining possible and are used to organize, analyze, and report information to support business intelligence, especially data analytics.
- Analytics and reporting systems: These systems provide ready access to critical customer data. Organizations use analytics and reporting systems to understand generic customer trends, process data collected, and get sales, marketing and customer service information for campaigns.
Using Data to Gain Competitive Advantage
The McKinsey Global Institute reported that data-driven organizations are 23 times more likely to acquire customers, six times as likely to retain them, and 19 times as likely to be profitable as a result. The key to competitive advantage is understanding information on customers through data-enabled learning, which creates “network effects”.
Traditionally, data on customers was collected by analyzing sales data, conducting customer surveys, and holding focus groups. But these methods are time consuming methods and limited in the number of customers they cover. The advent of the cloud and new technologies has dramatically transformed the way businesses collect and process information on customers, and use that information to improve and enhance and customize their offerings more and more. As an article from Oxera explains, companies that have more data can use that data and machine learning algorithms to produce a superior product, which will help them attract more customers, from whom they gather more data, and so on. The article rightly describes this as a “vicious circle of learning from customer data”.
Source: Oxera.
So achieving competitive advantage in this digital world is not really about having more data, but about analyzing real-time data closer to closer to the customer, the device, or the transaction – the points where the actual processes are happening. Google, Alibaba and Amazon, Apple, and Facebook rely on regular network effects enriched by data-enabled learning to win in the marketplace.
Outsourcing Solutions to Support Data Management
Outsourcing solutions such as data entry, data cleansing, data mining, and document scanning improve data quality and support data management in many ways:
- Improve accuracy and reliability of data: Quality data is essential to support effective decision-making. Data quality is defined by qualities such as accuracy, precision, timeliness, reliability, and completeness, and the extent to which it is useful for a given purpose. With the latest software, skilled data entry professionals, quality control measures, and best practices, outsourcing companies can ensure quality data for business decision making. Data cleansing fixes or removes incorrect, duplicate, corrupted, incorrectly formatted, or incomplete data within a dataset. Insights and analysis depends on using quality data.
- Speed up provision of services and information: Data mining helps retrieve valuable insights from huge, diverse, and constantly renewable datasets. Automated data capture and optical character recognition (OCR) speeds up the provision of services and information, and allows you to meet the needs of customers, vendors, and employees. Modern OCR software is accurate and fast, and can manage various limitations associated with document processing such as low quality images/scans, poorly formatted scans, handwritten content, etc., eliminating the need for cumbersome manual interventions. OCR is applicable to invoices, HR documents, purchase order forms, claims, surveys and application forms, transforming them into searchable text files from which it is easy to find relevant information. Intelligent data capture saves the time and effort which would be needed to extract the required information from huge volumes of documents.
- Reduces costs: Paper records slow workflow, take up a lot of storage space, and drive up costs. By going paperless and minimizing physical storage requirements, document scanning and data entry services reduce overhead costs. It also ensures instant access to business documents and makes files editable and shareable, promoting a collaborative environment and increasing productivity and efficiency. Investing in these outsourcing solutions helps you stay miles ahead of competition.
- Improves control and compliance: Data analytics is essential to increase efficiency, improve business decision-making and attain that important competitive edge. It also ensures that your data remains compliant with security standards. Physical documents increase risks of security breaches. With digitized documents, you would have a very detailed audit trail to track and trace accounting records, project details, or other financial data. An audit trail is required for compliance in many industries.
Modern businesses are tech-savvy, fast-paced, and extremely agile. Staying competitive would be a major challenge if your data is not accurate, properly managed and indexed. Outsourced data entry and document scanning services in NYC can help you make the most of your structured and unstructured data and ensure you have information to take strategic decisions for continued growth. In addition helping you keep your data up-to-date and relevant, outsourcing services minimize the administrative loads, freeing you to focus on high-value, core business activities. With the right partner, you can get your data ready for analytics to improve business intelligence, ensure better decision-making, and drive competitive advantage.
