How Different Teams Use Search Analytics to Make Decisions

The beauty of today’s accessible search-driven analytics is no one team or department has a monopoly on using them. In fact, you could argue every team can derive value from improved access to data analytics.

Here’s a glimpse into how various teams can use the data insights they glean from search analytics to shape their decision-making for the better.

Marketing and Sales

It’s possible the first teams you think of when you envision analytics are sales and marketing. It makes sense — these teams tend to track a wide range of key performance indicators (KPIs) and use data-driven insights to generate new leads and optimize campaigns.

Using advanced search analytics, marketers and sales leads can ask questions— about customer behavior, product performance, website traffic, conversions and etc. — on the spot, rather than relying on scheduled weekly or monthly reports from the IT team as their source of insights.

Customer Service

Customer service teams are on the front lines of an organization, interfacing directly with buyers and making (or breaking) a sense of loyalty to the brand.

One major way these teams can harness data analytics to improve the customer experience is by giving customer service representatives direct access to data insights about customers and products. This can help them identify customer issues; make more personalized suggestions and upsell effectively. According to one recent survey, high-performing customer service teams are over four times as likely than under-performers to agree they’ve given their service agents the tools and tech necessary to dig into customer and product information on the fly.

Customer service teams can also work with sales and marketing teams to address customer churn. One Fortune 200 telecommunication company used self-service search analytics from ThoughtSpot to figure out how much customer churn they were experiencing and why. They were then able to reduce customer churn and experienced a 750 percent return on investment (ROI) as a result.

Human Resources

Never underestimate how important the HR department is to a company’s overall performance — even if a lot of its hard work happens behind the scenes. Think for a moment about how much HR influences company culture, especially in terms of hiring and retaining quality employees. There’s now an increasing shift toward data-driven human resources, as teams use analytics insights to make decisions capable of bolstering employee morale and the bottom line.

A Gartner study reveals how the HR team within a U.S. financial services firm used data to improve hiring decisions — resulting in a big revenue boost. The company monitored the performance of employees within their first two years of employment, and then turned to the data to isolate characteristics that did or did not correlate to better performance.

The organization found the college hires attended and the grades they earned had no effect on their performance at work. Rather, what the best performers had in common was a degree in general. So, the company changed their hiring process to unweight college ranking and GPA while prioritizing candidates who had completed any college course and performed well in a job after college.

The result? The financial services firm raised revenue by $4 million within six months of making this change.

C-Suite Executives

Executives can use data to take a bird’s eye view of broad company performance or examine specific departments and initiatives as needed. This an important stepping stone toward building a data-centric company culture, and it’s a way to drive business outcomes using data rather than “gut feelings” or “seniority rules.”

According to Digitalist Magazine, a few areas in which executives can harness search analytics to make well-informed decisions include:

• Evaluating and optimizing operational processes
• Cultivating deeper customer relationships
• Eliminating areas of inefficiency and drains on performance
• Allotting resources where they’re best utilized

In a data-driven organization, every team can easily use search analytics to answer questions and improve performance.