The winds of change are upon us. You know that, by fully exploiting your data, you can revolutionise your decision-making processes, fuel your business growth, and gain a competitive advantage in your industry.
But here’s the catch – businesses, on average, are only using 50% of their accessible data. The culprit, more often than not, is the debilitating existence of data silos.
These silos can become evident in multiple ways:
- A struggle to create reliable reports.
- A tedious, error-prone process of P&L generation.
- A daunting task of quantifying marketing ROI or optimising conversion rates.
- A lack of clarity into critical factors such as customer lifetime value, buying behaviours, and cohort groupings.
- A difficulty in determining which sales tactics yield the most effective results.
The negative effects of data silos spread throughout all departments.
The response is often to address the most obvious symptoms within individual departments – it’s quicker and seemingly less complicated than orchestrating a company-wide strategy.
Unfortunately, this approach exacerbates the problem. Different systems, managed by separate departments, lead to the creation of more data silos. This generates data inconsistencies, trust issues and impede effective analysis. Therefore, the real antidote lies in addressing the root cause of data silos, rather than just attempting to soothe the symptoms.
To illustrate, let’s delve into the customer perspective:
An impressive 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and anticipate their expectations. Furthermore, 70% highlight that connected processes play a pivotal role in earning their business. These processes include seamless handoffs and personalised engagement driven by past interactions.
In contrast, fewer than 45% of marketers (as an example) utilise even the simplest personalisation data – such as purchase history, browsing history, referral sources, or click-stream data.
The most probable reason for this difference, is most probably that these data points, while available, are trapped in inconvenient silos.
So, how can we conquer the data silos?
The solution lies in a comprehensive data strategy that envelops the entire business not just departmental data. By consolidating all your data, we help you eradicate the symptoms and treat the roots of the data silo problem.
Consider these four steps:
Step 1: Centralise all data in one place. By Leveraging a data value platform to extract, load, transform and visualise, you can expedite this process while reducing human capital and cost.
Step 2: Apply your business logic to your centralised data. By doing this, you create a single source of truth, consolidating all data that every department can trust and rely on.
Step 3: Address existing data quality issues and start trusting your data. Instead of fixing source system data before centralisation, establishing a central data store first can facilitate easier identification of data problems. This approach is more efficient and helps avoid unnecessary work duplicate or redundant information and make the data reliable.
Step 4: Enable your team to fully leverage the data. By adopting a data value platform like Kleene.ai, you can initiate strategic initiatives, such as customer personalisation, churn prediction, inventory optimisation and more . This allows you to consolidate all your data in a single source of truth and make impactful changes to key business metrics using actionable insights.
Conclusion
Data silos represent a widespread issue that inhibits company-wide efficiency, with their effects rippling through various departments. Inaccessible and inconsistent data lead to wasted hours, as teams wrestle with reconciling discrepancies or scouring for needed data.
However, by implementing a single, comprehensive platform like Kleene.ai, organisations can not only resolve these issues at their core but also unlock the latent potential within their data.
The result is more than just a resolution to data inconsistencies and accessibility problems. It’s the creation of a strategic asset: a consolidated data repository that drives actionable insights, empowers your team to implement strategic initiatives, and fundamentally improves the way your business operates.
By taking these steps, you’re not just treating the root cause of data silos but also fostering an environment where data becomes a catalyst for strategic decision-making. This ensures that your business can remain agile, responsive, and successful in an increasingly data-centric world.
Want to learn more? there are other ways you can get value from Kleene.ai:
- Download our “A Step-By-Step Guide to Getting From Raw Data to Decision Intelligence” eBook
- Book a call with an expert and learn how retailers are achieving automated decision intelligence https://kleene.ai/talk-to-an-expert/
