With the onset of COVID-19, brands across the globe are undergoing structural re-alignment, r-engineering and re-adjustment to strengthen their capabilities amidst the crisis. Despite the uncertain nature of COVID-19 and its vast scale of implications, there is a strong positive wave across businesses that they will be able to get through this and continue to deliver to their promises to customers. This wave of positive energy, confidence and expectation comes from the belief in the modern tools available with the businesses to continue with the same levels of service excellence.

Partners to McKinsey & Company in one of their articles on accelerating analytics to navigate COVID-19 rightly discuss that business leaders had increasingly embraced advanced analytics and artificial intelligence for good reasons and these two together are expected to result in an annual economic value of up to $15.4 trillion in times to come. Analytics, AI and Machine Learning are poised to be the key digital accelerators that will help brand sail in the turbulent times of the new normal.

According to a recent State of BI & Analytics Report by Analytics Insight magazine in May 2020, 55% of businesses rely on analytics to focus on improving efficiency as well as for predicting changes and outcomes. Forty-seven percent of them utilize the data to better serve their customers, whereas 45% of them are relying on data for predicting business outcomes.

Analytics is helping business leaders in making crucial decisions pertaining to present challenge and to predict future outcomes. Analytics is solving some of the most relevant and crucial questions for business leaders today about increasing customer engagement for boosted revenues, about cost prudence and optimization, providing seamless digital journey and the ability to forecast trends in supply and demand.

Boosting Sales and Revenues

COVID-19 has acted as a catalyst for digital transformation as customers were pushed to go digital and most of the purchasing activity was limited to online platforms. Leveraging analytics and artificial intelligence is helping businesses to have a complete view of the customer- their buying patterns, sentiments, behaviors, interactions, experiences and online behavior. Application of deep learning and cognitive technologies to customer data gives in-depth insights for customer segmentation, targeting and personalized offerings that leads to higher customer acquisitions, boosted sales, improved profit margins and higher revenues.

Cost Prudence and Cost Efficiency

More than ever, businesses are fighting the survival battle given dwindling demands, supply chain bottlenecks and receding cash flows. Data analytics, clubbed with AI and automation can help organizations to reduce their expenditure and cost incurred in their regular operation and workflows by reducing the gaps, cutting costs without sacrificing on quality, bridging loopholes in service operations and realigning underperforming departments. New data insights can drastically help companies in making informed decisions. For example, an insurance provider stands greater chances to track and manage fraudulent and false claims with analytical interventions. Similarly, financial institutions are to be greatly aided by data analytics for portfolio optimization, fraud identification, risk management and credit modelling, leading to cost optimization for these institutions. Analytics can also help utility and telecom companies to detect and identify defaulting customers who are more likely to pay.

Providing Seamless Digital Journey

Data analytics with its structured data can tremendously help businesses to respond to highly volatile digital environment as customer’s digital engagement is on the rise. It gives business leaders the ability to react on real-time and engage with customers with truly personalized offerings. Analysis of big data offers the opportunity for interactions with customers based on their personality and present needs by understanding their attitudes, browsing behaviors and patterns as well as their real-time location, device and platforms usage. Customers are thus assured of a seamless digital journey that gives them delightful experiences both during the pre purchase and post purchase phase.

Forecasting Supply & Demand Accurately

The present quantum of uncertainty created by COVID-19 can be rightly managed and tackled with the help of forecasting model built on data and analytics. Companies can build efficient supply chains by predicting fluctuating baselines with the help of data analytics. Companies can leverage data and analytics to identify demand and supply opportunities, to minimizes supply-chain costs, remove bottlenecks, increase return on investment and drive productive business outcomes in the new normal. Data driven enterprises are poised to shift themselves from laggards to leaders by reinventing business models to operate at speed, accuracy and scale - meeting the new risen customer demands and changing economic landscape.

Decision making in the new normal will depend highly on data and analytics led insights more that ever, as businesses will rely on analytics for building operational resilience. It will turn out to be a game changer as organizations will not just recover from the disaster but will be able to sail through this turbulence with reduced costs, boosted revenues and increased sales.

Espire Infolabs offers best in class data driven solutions leveraging our transformative Customer Engagement Hub framework in collaboration with our strategic partnerships to empower decision makers to effortlessly unlock enterprise data to study business patterns, predict risks and identify growth opportunities. We make it simple for business users to marry insights with credible business actions. You can reach out to us at marketing@espire.com and do subscribe to our blog for latest insights and updates.