Bust The Numbers: Using Analytics To Improve Your Business

This is a contributed article.

Photo By Luke Chesser

Digital technology has made business quite a bit easier over the last few years. Not only has the process of working gotten better, but modern systems have begun to give you ways to track a huge range of statistics surrounding your work. You can figure out which team members have the best productivity, how much you’re selling in each country, and a staggering variety of other metrics which can be used to push your company forward. To help you out with this, this post will be exploring analytics, and the best ways to use this complicated field to improve your business.

Understanding The Numbers

The first part of this challenge comes with understanding the numbers which you’re being presented with. Bar charts, histograms, and other ways to convey information can be confusing when you haven’t been in a math class for a decade or two. Studying MS Analytics online is one of the best ways to get to grips with this. While a course like this will be long, the benefits which it can provide to your business can be monumental, and this makes it well worth it. The right programs will be able to be taken while you’re still working, eating into your free time instead of making you focus all of your attention on it.

Collecting The Data

Once you have the skills to understand the information which you can collect with analytics, it will be time to start opening the doors to this sort of data. There are several areas which will be important, and they include your website, your internal productivity, and your customer satisfaction, all of which can be monitored automatically. Companies like Google make it very easy to keep a watchful eye over your analytics, and it shouldn’t be too hard to find services which can work for other aspects of your business.

Finding The Weak Points

Using the data you collect will largely revolve around finding weak points within your business and stamping them out. For example, you may find that you’re spending a lot of money to post products on eBay, but aren’t getting anything out of it. In this case, it would be worth scrapping this side of your venture, as it is only costing you money. This can be difficult when the weak points you find are team members. Instead of simply getting rid of them, though, you can use tools like development plans to push them in the right direction. Not everyone will improve, but some people will become very good team members because of this.

With all of this in mind, you should be feeling ready to start using numbers to improve your business. A lot of people struggle with this, finding it hard to know what needs to be done when they are faced with page after page of analytics. While this will take some learning, it will be well worth the effort, and most people are able to benefit from this work in their business.