Small business owners always find themselves struggling in a highly competitive and dynamic environment. You may encounter challenges daily that include boosting profitability, customer retention and acquisition and the need to stay ahead of your competitors. The lack of a well-defined business strategy and adequate resources will lead to your business crumbling in the face of this constant pressure.
There is no doubt that today’s marketplace is fiercely competitive, and businesses with access to better capital and resources have a distinctive advantage. However, it is also true that new technologies and disciplines are allowing businesses of all sizes to compete on the same level. Data science solutions have redefined the ways in which businesses operate.
It wouldn’t be wrong to worry about the financial cost implications of data science. But, at the macro level, a properly drawn investment strategy will bring in benefits of data science in the long run.
We will give you a glance of such smart investment strategies in the later part of this article. For now, let’s look at why data science solutions may be perfect for you.
Why Should Small Businesses opt for Data Science Solutions?
Small Businesses are More Agile to Changes
As ironic as it may seem, small businesses are the most suitable candidates for disruptive innovations like data analytics due to their size. Unlike large businesses, smaller ones are not bound by a conventional pattern. With lesser hierarchical levels, small businesses enjoy faster decision-making.
Small sized enterprises start with smaller-scale projects. It is easy to experiment with data science solutions with such smaller projects. Based on the success of the projects, stakeholders decide on the feasibility of adopting more such solutions going forward. Minimal investments are an added advantage of starting off with small scale projects.
Integrated Teams
Small businesses have teams that are close knit and are more integrated. These teams provide the perfect podium to implement disruptive technologies. To prove themselves and bring value to the business within a short period of time, they remain highly motivated and go beyond their abilities to adopt, implement, and sustain data science solutions.
Urge to Improve Efficiency
Operating a small business often means working with limited resources of time, people and capital. They are forced to optimize resources to maximize performance and productivity. As a result, data science solutions are necessary to get actionable data insights. These insights help enterprises to track and review performance data, business and growth strategies, and marketing campaigns.
Data Science for Small Business-Top Use Cases
Customer Acquisition
To deal with the challenges of lack of resources to target a large audience for customer acquisition, data science solutions such as customer analytics can be used. This analytical model analyzes data derived from sources like sales data, social media, census data, and customer service logs. They help in generating insights into several factors such as customers’ likes, dislikes, their next purchase date, the reason why they switch from one brand to the other, among many. Valuable insights like these help businesses reconfigure their products and services portfolio to improve customer acquisition.
Customer Retention
Sentiment and behavioral analytics analyse a customer’s buying and usage trend for a product. This provides insights into a customer’s thought and level of satisfaction about a product and their likelihood of staying loyal to the brand.
Insights like these are extremely important for small businesses, as they reduce the need for them to wait for their product’s acceptance. Insights into customers’ response to the product allow an enterprise to quickly make improvisations in their product offerings to retain their customer base.
Small businesses are adopting a hyper personalization approach to retain customers. This approach involves creating a unique customer profile, which is then fed with the customer’s information. Such an approach allows the business to adapt with the customer’s evolving preferences to optimize their offerings.
Improving Productivity
Businesses can use the digital twin technology to track and improve operational efficiency and productivity. Small scale manufacturing industries can make their operations smarter by creating a virtual twin of their product that is either being manufactured or already manufactured which is then fed with real-time data derived from sensors fitted to the components of the actual product. Analyzing the data, an enterprise can optimize their manufacturing process to achieve an overall operational efficiency.
Enterprises use workforce analytics to collect and analyze their employee’s work activity data which provides insights into an employee’s time management, tool usage, collaboration with team members, and so on. Businesses can draw an optimal productivity plan geared for specific employees. For instance, specific productivity plans can be created for employees who lag in technology usage. Such plans bring all the employees at par with their employers’ expectations and boost their efficiency.
Operation Automation
Automation is one of the most important beneficial applications of data science. For instance, in the case of automated ticket assignments, service tickets are allocated to the right departments, and they also send automatic updates to the customer. Chatbots minimize the time taken for an on-call issue resolution. It helps agents to avoid the routine task of taking down customer details and rather directly focus on the issue. At times a chatbot is programmed with answers that enable it to resolve regular queries by itself.
Automation of lead and contact management is crucial for small businesses to advance their business prospects. CRM automation can automatically scoop out information entered by website visitors and add the same in an enterprise’s email marketing scheduled lists. It segregates customers based on the information they have entered and automatically generates a welcome mail.
Automating the process lead scoring and notifying when there’s a change are key parts of CRM. This helps an agent to move the lead up in the prospects’ list and take necessary actions. Automating these functions help the agents to focus on their negotiations.
Data Science for Small Business- How We Assist You?
We indicated in the beginning of the article that a smart investment strategy is the way to go for small businesses to optimize their investments on data science. Investing in an expert data analytics solutions provider is one such strategy. Building an in-house team doesn’t prove to be cost-effective.
For small businesses, using data science has its own sets of challenges and requires an expert third-party vendor. The existence of an enormous amount of data will be the biggest challenge. The data boom has motivated enterprises to use various ERPs and CRMs to collect data related to customers, employees, or sales. Using data from multiple sources will complicate its use.
To address this challenge, we provide you with a central platform to integrate all the data from different sources. We then create a data strategy to prioritize datasets based on their relevance and immediate usage. We follow it up with a data quality management plan.
Massive amounts of data but lack of storage space is a typical problem faced by small business owners. Buying more computational power can prove to be a costly solution. We address this challenge by migrating your data to cloud data warehouses.
Using lineage tools, we address the challenges of data inconsistency across departments that hamper defining KPIs for teams. This helps to understand who owns the data table and the data schema to monitor any data change and flag data malpractices.
Who Are We and Why Are We Considered as An Industry Authority?
This article is penned by Flatworld Edge, a pioneer in data analytics solutions. We specialize in creating and delivering artificial intelligence solutions and services from DSYDE™. These solutions empower your business with cutting-edge AI capabilities that can be used to design affordable and scalable data analytics solutions. If you are looking for application of data science in your business contact us now.
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