William Niles is the Chief Executive Officer for Brinks Home.
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No matter what industry you work in, by now, you have probably heard people talking about “big data.” You don’t have to be Facebook or Google to know that customer interactions can yield a wealth of information that helps you tailor, improve and enhance the customer experience. With more data available than ever before — in fact, some experts say that by 2025 there will be 463 exabytes of data created daily — it's easy to lose the human element as you measure new KPIs or NPVs on your company or customers.
Over the last eight months, my team and I have worked on building our enterprise data hub (aka the EDH). Our organization includes numerous lines of business, each with its own unique functions, goals, expertise, challenges and data. Each domain plays a key role in the company’s goal of creating profitable accounts at scale and retaining them for life.
A key enabler of this goal, notwithstanding amassing a talented team, is the thoughtful execution of decision science leveraging tools such as our EDH. Decision science, for us, is the use of governance and quantitative techniques applied to data that spans our people, processes and systems used to inform the decisions we make.
No longer is it good enough to go with your gut. The EDH serves as a secure cloud-based repository for all information generated across the enterprise. Once disparate in nature, our data sources are now pooled together with data governance applied to create a unified source of truth that can be leveraged to make more informed, data-driven decisions. This has introduced new levels of empowerment, velocity and accuracy of reporting and insight generation that help propel our business forward and improve our customer experience.
If you’re considering using data to deliver the best experience to employees and customers alike, here are a few things we’ve learned along the way — because we know that data is nothing without people at its core.
Create a data hub or center.
Pulling all your information into one place breaks down data silos and creates a transparent, enterprise-wide data layer that gives visibility to all departments. This also allows you to leverage decision science to make more informed choices for customers, employees and, ultimately, your business. In our case, the hub operates under a set of governing standards that help ensure compliance with all data regulations; it also allows us to have unbiased, defined and objective information available in near real time.
Reach customers more effectively through data.
When you establish a robust data platform and begin applying advanced analytic/data science approaches to customer-centric use cases such as voice of customer (VoC), you begin to gain access (in real time) to all of your information streams, allowing you to identify customer sentiment around specific topics. This, in turn, allows you to bring your customer feedback and voice directly into the decision-making process for product and service innovations. An additional benefit, in our case, is that the hub has allowed us to add artificial intelligence (AI) into our customer experience, enabling our ability to offer a personalized, relevant experience to our customers based on what we’ve learned from data.
Improve your talent recruitment and retention.
Access to cross-functional data helps you drive improvements to the hiring funnel, getting candidates through the process and into their new roles more efficiently. This has helped us decrease hiring time, remove hiccups in the process, decrease costs and, most importantly, improve the candidate’s as well as the company’s experience.
These programs are just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what we hope to accomplish with big data and growing our organization’s digital and analytic maturity models. However, the key component in each of them is remembering that the data we're mining is being used by team members to drive important decisions and is tied to the individual people we serve. As long as we continue to put people at the forefront (employees and customers alike) and enable them to make informed decisions with curated information, the future is bright.
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