Win with Advanced Business Analytics: Creating Business Value from Your Data

BUSINESS PERFORMANCE TRACKING

Performance tracking analyzes the success of a company’s initiatives or activities by comparing what actually happened to what was planned or predicted. We outlined that analytics implementation requires changes in the way people do things. We started the book with the analytics challenge, and, more important, we underscored that the ultimate goal of any analytics project is to address critical business challenges. Yet a key question remains: after implementing analytics, have we seen any business changes? To answer that question, we have to measure the results of analytics-based actions. Therefore, business performance tracking asks questions such as

• Have we seen any changes in the way that sales representatives cover their territories?
• Have we seen any increase in customer retention?
• Have we seen any increase in customer acquisition?
• Have we seen any increase in the average spend per customer?
• Have we seen any increase in customer up-sell?

Performance tracking is not only the measurement of analytics solutions at work. It is also about managing the evaluation of the impact of the analytics business solutions and is a closed feedback cycle. It is an ongoing quality improvement process, where the tracking of the solutions delivered versus the results achieved, based on a specific set of key metrics or indicators, is constantly evaluated.

For instance, if the business goal is to reduce churn, we need to evaluate whether the churn has actually decreased ...