Companies rely on data to gain meaningful insights about their prospects and customers in order to target them effectively as well as provide a personalized experience. Unfortunately, collecting and using data is not without difficulties. A report [download page] from NetBase Quid looks at where companies are seeing the biggest data disconnects.
Two of the biggest issues companies around the world are facing while navigating digitally transformed markets are opportunity gaps with data, skills, and technology (35% share of all problems) and disconnected data sources and poor infrastructure (33% share). A deeper look at the problems companies are facing with analytics, data and processes shows that close to two-thirds (64%) have difficulty integrating data from different sources. Some 6 in 10 also say that although customer feedback exists, it is fragmented across various systems, while 57% are spending too much time on data and not on insights.
To a lesser extent, the senior company leaders surveyed also identified problems such as business systems being mostly internally focused without a view of external markets (36%), the volume of consumers and market data being too large to analyze (35%) and marketing analytics systems and process being unable to keep pace with changes (28%). Furthermore, 3 in 10 (28%) say that answering CEO and executive questions and updating them is a lot of work.
The good news is that companies appear to have plans to fill the gaps and fix the data problems they are encountering. About two-thirds (64%) say they want a data analytics system that has consumer, market and competitor data integrated seamlessly, while more than half (55%) need smarter dashboards, reporting and briefing capabilities. They also believe that a system that automatically refreshes data and insights in near real-time (52%) may also alleviate some of the problems they are facing.
Although marketers have run into other challenges leveraging marketing automation tools to their fullest potential, about half (48%) want more automation in the insight generation process. Other companies will seek better technology to understand and leverage large amounts of written content and unstructured data (46%).
The full report can be found here.
About the Data: Findings are based on a survey of 1,000 senior leaders from companies around the world.
