Finally, A Tool to Clear the Data Analysis Bottleneck
If you don’t have a data discovery tool to help manage your company’s research data and survey results, you probably spend a lot of your time feeling like Sisyphus. No matter how many questions you answer, your market insights team is always facing more.
But data discovery and analysis doesn’t have to take days or weeks. When a team member wants to find a simple answer to an ad hoc business question, with the right tools, your team can provide efficient answers without wasting time. Or, even better, you can empower people to locate the answers they’re looking for independently by democratizing data throughout your organization.
Here’s how a data discovery platform can help you clear the data analysis bottleneck and promote a better culture of data-powered decision-making at your company.
Make It Easy to Locate and Access the Data You Need
Whether your marketing insights team is approached with an ad hoc question or a query that builds into a major strategic initiative, one of the first things they need to figure out is if the data that will help answer this question already exists within your foundational research.
If the answer is yes, then they need to locate that data set or the individual that has access to it. If there is a deck, where is the final version? Are they in the office today, or did the author leave the company three years ago?
With a data discovery tool, you can store survey results from the past and integrate with active third-party survey providers to build a complete resource that can help your team locate data sources (and answers) without also looking for the individual employees who commissioned past research projects. Perhaps it goes without saying, but cutting out these steps will save your teams a huge amount of a highly valuable resource: time.
Democratize and Socialize Your Data
When someone approaches you with a question, they may feel like they’re getting in a long line. This line isn’t sorted by arrival time (as it might be at the deli), it’s a line that’s curated by priority. Your market insights pros and data analysts are in high demand, and low-priority questions are less likely to get timely answers.
The delay prevents teams from making data-driven decisions because they don’t have the access or skills they need.
Democratize data – making it available to more people – doesn’t go as far as socializing your data sources. With a data discovery platform, your data won’t be hidden in silos that are owned by a few hegemons. While your market insights team can still control who sees what data using access controls, a data discovery tool can help more people answer their own questions by deploying semantic search.
By implementing data democratization using a platform that leverages natural language search tools, you truly empower more people to get answers more quickly. If an executive needs the answer to a high-impact question today, a data discovery tool makes it easier for your market insights team to locate that data point. This also makes that answer accessible to folks who aren’t trained data scientists or market researchers.
Empower Other Teams to Answer Questions with a Data Discovery Platform
One of the ways to reduce friction around the data analysis bottleneck is to empower specific individuals within your team to answer their own questions faster.
For example, if you have a sales team that relies on regional managers to do weekly or monthly reporting on customer satisfaction, that team would benefit from access to a data discovery tool. In addition to answering one-off questions about developments in their geographic area, these team members could benefit from creating a dashboard within the platform to get the most up-to-date information at a glance.
While there aren’t hard numbers to represent how much time this saves your team, one of the main things we hear from those who use them. Gartner’s 2018 Marketing Analytics Study identified this issue directly: “Marketing analysts can spend what feels like, and may actually be, 20 to 30 hours of their work week shepherding, wrangling and corralling their data,” but that doesn’t mean it has to be this way.
Each time someone is able to locate a data point for themself, the queue outside your market insights teams’ door gets shorter.
Clear the Data Analysis Bottleneck and Boost Your Efficiency
Market researchers often find themselves sidetracked by questions. Maybe the sales team or executives need a single point of data to fill out a deck for the end of the week. Maybe your priorities shift midweek, and your team is forced to start a brand new search for the right data point.
Data discovery tools are built to clear the bottleneck by democratizing data and giving your team more access to the survey results you already have. These tools make hunting down answers less time-consuming, enabling your market research team to get back to their priorities or efficiently refocus on a new set of questions.
