How Data Analytics Can Help You Through The Downturn

With inflation sky-high and the largest interest rate percentage point increase since 1994 (.75 %),  many experts claim a recession is coming. It’s time to take stock of how to protect your organization from financial erosion if a market collapse does in fact, happen.

How can you make sure you are turning over every rock to stay in the green? The answer is data. Data analytics is the science of analyzing big data sets and finding patterns and anomalies that can create conclusions about that information. Data analytics looks at data trends and answers questions like:

• What has happened historically with this data? (Describe)
• Why is this happening? (Diagnose)
• What would change this outcome? (Predict)
• What should be done about it? (Prescribe)

Understanding the patterns within your data gives you metrics to build KPIs for tracking good and bad results.

Incorporating data analytics into your entire business model can help protect company capital. Here are five areas we’ve identified where you can put data analytics to work to keep your organization financially sound.

1 – Customer Retention & Satisfaction

Data analytics can help you determine expected behavior associated with account turnover and set those metrics to work in accounts you hope to build recurring revenue with.

Examples of a data model you could create to increase renewals would include identifying metrics like the frequency of product use, the number of logins, percentage of unopened emails from account managers, etc., based on the data of churned customers. Catching customers falling into these patterns before they move on to a competitive offering allows you to make a difference in this decision.

It costs 5x to 8x more to acquire a customer than to retain an existing one, so plugging data analytics into a retention strategy is an easy way to keep revenue from spilling out.

2 – Upselling & Cross-selling

Data analytics can give important access to user experience insights for precision-based marketing campaigns.  Without a data analytics strategy, businesses spam email bases with the same messaging, hoping to get a few bites.  The risk of spraying generic offers includes lost engagement, fatigued clients, and mass “unsubscribe” clicks. Data analytics allow organizations to contact customers in the frequency and channel of their choice and with products that have genuine value to their situation.

With access to the information on which customers have what products, you can use data analytics to determine what product bundling or combinations are the most likely to succeed and which add-on products to avoid promoting. Targeted cross-selling strategies and add-on promos increase the likelihood of successful campaigns without annoying subscribers.

3 – Operational Excellence

Creating a stable network for employees and customers to interact on is one of the most critical benefits data analytics contribute.

The history of network outages and interruptions can feed a model that informs future decisions with capacity planning, QoS policies, bandwidth allocation,  application decisions and more. Once analyzed, this raw data allows networks to predict and prevent future downtime.

Data analytics delivers actionable metrics that can be used for setting thresholds and alerts that kick in before congestion is felt. Keeping everything humming is an easy way to avoid unnecessary costs from network interruptions.

Uptime institute’s 2022 outage assessment found that roughly 60% of the outages in 2022 cost enterprises over $100,000 in losses, up 21% from just two years ago in 2019. Whatever that number is for you, nothing feels quite as expensive as preventable loss.

4 – Streamlined Development

Data analytics are the secret power behind nimble product improvement and development. Data can reveal precisely when a product function begins failing and when it needs additional capacity to remain viable. It can also measure the results of product tweaks to determine if results are trending in the right direction and exactly how these changes impact the product’s performance. Data analytics can help turbo charge dev teams in these ways:

• Keeps workflows moving
• Makes sure all decisions are data-driven
• Decreases the time needed to hit milestones
• Accelerates the release of deliverables.

5 – Threat Protection

Sometimes called Security Analytics, this approach is similar to the predictive modeling used to prevent network congestion and outages. Threats can be intervened by modeling based on threat signatures, known indicators of compromise, and other patterns common in malicious attacks. Detecting suspicious traffic and unusual activity through behavior analytics can stop an attack before it fully unfurls. Data analysis can be used post-mortem after attacks to identify how access was gained and what points of vulnerability were exploited in the network. Understanding what happened is critical to prevent future hacks. If you don’t identify the vulnerability, it can be used repeatedly.

About LiveAction

LiveAction uses data analytics to power our threat detection tool, ThreatEyeNV, and our network and application monitoring tool, LiveNX. Don’t lose money from preventable network incidents and breaches. Data analytics can protect you from the unknown unknowns so your investments can go towards progressing your company vision, good market or bad.

How it feels after you start making and saving money by using data analytics!