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Technology moves fast. As a small business owner, keeping up with the latest ways to use technology may seem overwhelming, especially with your long to-do list.
But tapping into technology is exactly what small business owners like you can do to streamline processes, save time, improve efficiencies, and grow your business.
Let’s talk about business data analytics.
From customer information to inventory management, your business generates a lot of data. If you don’t really know what to do with all of that data, you aren’t alone. There are Fortune 500 companies that struggle with using their data.
But all of that data is valuable. Technology tools like the Homebase everything app for hourly workers can transform your data into actionable insights that you can use to benefit your business – a process called data analytics.
Business data analytics can help you:
Make informed decisions. Are you thinking about adding a new product or service? How about expanding your business hours? Do you think you need to hire more staff? Data analytics can help with all of those questions and more. Data analytics tools collect and sort your data, giving you insights into trends based on past activity and customer behaviors. You can use those insights to help you make informed decisions that aren’t driven by guesswork or emotions.
Uncover operational inefficiencies. Inefficiencies in any area of your business costs you money. Business data analytics can uncover operational inefficiencies or areas of low productivity so you can take action to resolve issues.
Build growth strategies. Seeing what has – and has not – worked in the past can help guide your decisions on future growth. You can use data analytics as an additional tool to help you build your strategic planning and growth strategies.
5 ways to apply business data analytics in your small business.
While the possibilities offered by data are endless, here are five ways you can find success using business data analytics.
1. Increase sales and revenue
Looking at past sales data, you can identify sales patterns and trends. Based on that information, you can plan more effective and targeted marketing campaigns. You can also manage your staffing needs, adding more staff during times of historically high sales.
Analyzing sales data can also help you identify top-selling products or services and optimize your pricing structure to maximize revenue.
2. Acquire new customers
Business data analytics can tell you a lot about your customers. Using that data, you can create marketing campaigns that target similar personas that haven’t discovered you yet.
You can also analyze how your customers find you, and then focus advertising dollars on those channels to reach new customers.
3. Improve the customer experience
Business data analytics can help gain greater insights into your customer’s preferences and shopping habits. You can use that information to offer more personalized experiences.
You can also monitor customer satisfaction and analyze feedback. Based on the data, you can uncover trends and pain points along the customer journey. Addressing the issues your data reveals can greatly improve the customer experience, which will help you retain existing customers and acquire new ones.
4. Improve employee performance and productivity
It’s estimated that labor costs eat up 70% of business revenues. Data analytics can help you track employee attendance and performance. You can use data to uncover areas where you can optimize your schedule to reduce paying for employee downtime.
You can also use data analytics to measure individual and team performance, which can inform your workforce management decisions.
5. Maximize cost optimization
Save money on inventory costs by using data analytics to monitor inventory levels, review past inventory trends, and understand your inventory turnover rate. You can also use business data analytics to improve logistics, saving money.
Implementing business data analytics
The basic steps for implementing business data analytics are:
Identify your data sources
Clean and organize your data points
Integrate your data sources onto a tool or data analytics platform
Evaluate the output
Identifying your data sources is pretty straightforward. Think about all the technology tools you use where you have to input information about your business. This includes your CRM, eCommerce platform, eMarketing tools, and even custom databases.
Once you identify your data, you can look at the information that is available and decide what you really need. For instance, you may not be interested in a customer’s middle name, even though it is a field in your CRM.
Once you know where your data lives and what data points you are interested in analyzing, you can use a data analytics platform or other integration platform to pull that data together and analyze it based on what you want to learn.
Homebase integrations do the heavy lifting so you don’t have to.
At Homebase, we’ve done the heavy lifting for you, creating an app that delivers data analytics to your fingertips. We have also developed integrations with key partners, enabling you to combine data from your other data sources.
Centralized data management
Because the Homebase app helps you manage your workforce, it contains all of the key data points about your team, including work schedules, time tracking, and your team roster.
With our integrations, you can automatically pull in data from your point-of-sale or eCommerce tools and other business integration tools to centralize your important data in one easily accessible place.
This gives you easy access in real-time to your data on one platform – no more searching through different apps or multiple tools (and remembering all of those passwords).
For example, you know that your business picks up in August as families do back-to-school shopping. Several members of your team have asked for vacation time in August though. Using the Homebase app, you can pull in your sales data to see how early in August sales started to spike over the past few years. You can then automatically create a schedule that accommodates your team’s vacation requests while ensuring you have enough coverage on your historically busy days.
Mapping your schedule to historically busy days also improves the customer experience, as there will be enough employees working to serve each customer quickly. It also helps save on labor costs, as you will have the right number of employees working to accommodate sales for both busy and slow times.
Customizable dashboards and reports
You can create personalized dashboards for key performance indicators (KPIs) in the Homebase app to quickly see the data that is important to you in real time.
You can also generate automated reports for sales, employee performance, productivity and more, and easily share those insights with other team members.
Actionable insights and recommendations
With the easy-to-read customizable dashboards and reports, you can identify trends and patterns in your data. Homebase’s data analytics provides actionable insights across key areas such as sales trends, customer behavior, employee performance, and operational efficiency.
The app also delivers data-driven recommendations for optimization, growth, and strategic decision making by using powerful artificial intelligence.
It’s time to put your data to work.
Data is called the new currency for a reason – it holds the power to help your business increase sales and revenue and exceed your growth goals.
Leveraging business data analytics is essential for you to optimize your operations and make informed decisions about all aspects of your business. By implementing a comprehensive data analytics strategy with the help of the Homebase app, you can unlock the full potential of your data.
Get started with Homebase and put your data to work.
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