The Internet is a vehicle that moves at startling speed. If you wait for results about your sites until a lot of time has gone by, then this could often be too late depending on your goals. Having the ability to measure your data in as close to real time as possible, say on a day to day basis instead of having to wait for the next week or month, you will have a tremendous advantage over others competing in your same field who aren’t doing as well. Here a few general tips about data efficiency.
Customer Service Response
An example of a category of data that you could use sooner rather than later is customer service response scores. If you ask customers to rate various parts of your service on a scale of “10 to 10,” for example, if you have certain areas that you’re really lagging on according to your consumers, then finding this data quickly is quite important. For example, it could tell you that the wait times on your phones are way too long, and this will help you allocate resources into improving these times.
Any number of problems can crop up that turn off employers, such as a particular agent with a surly attitude, or a difficult to navigate menu system in your call-in service. If you wait weeks or months to get this data back into your hands, then that means that you’ll be going weeks or months while holding onto this problem that could be causing you to have a high customer attrition rate and not get any new customers since they don’t want to deal with problem employees or confusing menus.
New Customers and Demographics
Another piece of data you really want to get soon is data regarding new customers. If new people register on your site and they’re taking polls, you want to know where they’re coming from. That is, you’ll want to know whether they came from Google, from word of mouth, or some other vehicle. This will give you a clear idea of what’s working and what isn’t. Again, if you get info on this weeks or months after it happens, then you won’t know what you’re doing right. You won’t be able to put more effort into that particular ad campaign or whatever other vehicle while it’s at its height. By the time you know it’s working if you don’t get it the next day, by then it could be too late.
KPIs
A “KPI” stands for a key performance indicator. It’s important to audit your KPIs on a regular basis since this will tell you how your performance is going in general, and also what specific areas you need to work on to show improvement. Success is defined by different KPIs depending on the field and who’s doing the looking.
The important thing is to use a service that can gather all of this data for you, rather than trying to handle all of it by yourself as a small business. Gathering data takes forever if you do it that way, and it often makes more sense to let the professionals get the data you need to you right away, when you need it.
This is a guest post by Kate Simmons, a freelance writer who shares the latest tech news on various blogs.