Data analytics - Jack of all trades, master of many
Data analytics is a role that offers huge potential for business but is also a hugely challenging one, says Lex Mundi’s Andy Johnston.
Data analytics - Jack of all trades, master of many
Data analytics is a role that offers huge potential for business but is also a hugely challenging one, says Lex Mundi’s Andy Johnston.
Data analytics can drive new insights, offer new marketing opportunities, and create efficiencies across the business. Being in the position to realise these opportunities is fraught with challenges however, often compelling professionals to be proficient in more than just traditional data analysis.
In professional services, this is often compounded by limited resources available to devote to data analytics, meaning there is little scope for staff to specialize, requiring data analytics professionals to be subject matter experts in all the required technologies. These include understanding database principles, data processing platforms such as Alteryx, Power BI and Tableau, Google Analytics, social media, mobile apps, and API technologies.
The first issue can be data discovery. One firm in the services sector had inherited 26 legacy databases from acquisitions that held data of use to marketing. Identifying these 26 databases took over a year to achieve due to teams protecting their own fiefdoms and lack of transparency. There was plenty of data, but it was fragmented, with limited - and sometimes zero - compatibility, making synchronization extremely problematic.
In addition, there are often myriad spreadsheets scattered across the firm, known only to the team or individual maintaining the data, acting as primitive databases.
With the digitization of so many marketing activities, analytics professionals need to manage the synchronisation and flow of data from various platforms such as mobile apps, search engines, and social media platforms. While CRM systems can be very useful at bringing at least some of the data into a single platform, the native analysis and visualisations in CRM systems can be somewhat basic – offering insights into just the headline figures such as email open rates, event attendance figures, or website sessions.
In addition, the ability to view data drawn from different data sets within the CRM can be limited, preventing for example, analysis of email open rates among all customers who had engaged with the firm on social media
So, while CRM systems can be useful in bringing data under one roof, the data can still be too siloed when you look under the hood to be truly as flexible and effective as analytics professionals would like. More sophisticated tools such as Power BI or Tableau may be required to fully deliver useful insights. In turn, this may require understanding of API’s to import the data from the CRM, and sophisticated data processing skills to transform the data into usable information.
Once the technological issues are overcome, there is still the human factor affecting the insights that analysis and visualisations can offer. Experience shows that colleagues – especially non-marketing colleagues - will only input data to the CRM that is compulsory or that they see as necessary to the core reporting activities of their team. This often overlooks data that is of use to data analytics.
“The challenges of data analytics in professional services firms are many and real, but the potential to transform marketing activities and raise the profile of marketing within the firm far outweigh the challenges.”
“The challenges of data analytics in professional services firms are many and real, but the potential to transform marketing activities and raise the profile of marketing within the firm far outweigh the challenges.”
For example, BD staff may omit to record the practice area that a deal belongs to, and events staff may not consider it important to record the company that an attendee works for if it’s not central to their reporting. Such information is likely to be of great use to data analytics however, and it can be challenging to persuade colleagues of the benefits to them of recording more complete data.
How can we encourage better data recording among colleagues? From my own experience through my career working in this area, one approach is to do the analysis anyway, with the incomplete data.
Presenting the analysis to colleagues, showing the insights that can be provided and new perspectives while highlighting how much more insightful the data would be if we had full and complete data sets has had very positive results. It has resulted in approaches from multiple colleagues about how to improve quality of their data, as well as enquiring what other insights can be provided and suggesting other insights they’d like to see.
At the most basic level, it fosters increased communication between teams and departments, and with the knowledge that we can collect the data that is there anyway, there is a shared interest in making the most of it to their own benefit.
Such issues are surely recognisable to data analytics professionals in many professional services firms, as well as other sectors. It can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming to replace legacy systems, especially in professional services, where enterprise level CRM systems may not be a cost-effective solution.
This requires us to implement a range of skills and technologies to try to realise the potential of the data floating around the firm, but the benefits can be huge. Entirely new and quantifiable insights into the performance of marketing activities have been realised, identifying new bases for segmenting customers to drive up performance and customer engagement.
The challenges of data analytics in professional services firms are many and real, but the potential to transform marketing activities and raise the profile of marketing within the firm far outweigh the challenges.
That being said, it’s often the challenges posed by the role that make it so exciting and rewarding to work in. To be able to identify all the highly complex impediments to seamless data, develop creative solutions for each of them, bring the data together and show insights that the wider firm hadn’t even imagined, is what makes data analytics such a satisfying career.