That magic moment: matching analytics with key business moments

We make thousands of decisions each day, from mundane ones such as what to wear and what to eat for lunch, to decisions about which products and services to buy. And while we spend time to reason through most of our decisions, some are made almost subconsciously and far more quickly than others.

These decisions are typically made in fleeting moments that are over just as quickly as they began. For organizations, these “business moments” represent incredibly valuable opportunities for them to influence the decisions of customers.  

According to Gartner, business moments are transient opportunities that can be exploited dynamically. Exactly where these business moments are in each organisation is not easy to define, which is what makes them so valuable.

Blink and you’ll miss it

The best examples happen in customer touchpoints at crucial junctures across the buying journey. For example, your customer could be making a decision about:

• the best time of the day, week or year to make a purchase 
• whether to stay on your website or application
• which products they want to buy 
• how much do they want to spend
• the products they haven’t considered but might be interested in buying

Capitalizing on these types of opportunities requires the ability to:

• quickly capture all available data about the scenario that your customer is currently in
• analyze the data to determine what is likely happening at that precise moment
• respond in real-time with value-added offerings and services designed specifically for influencing that customer’s behaviour

Few businesses have capitalized on business moments better than Amazon has with their ability to personalize every aspect of the purchasing experience with real-time analytics. As soon as they master one business moment, they move on to the next so they can perpetually stay one step ahead of competitors. As a result, 23% of Amazon’s customers admit the analytics know them so well that they often expect Amazon to tell them what they need next.

Customer facing moments aren’t the only business moments worth considering, however. There are many internal moments where your employees make dynamic decisions that contribute to business value. Finding these crucial decision points could create a similar effect by influencing employees to make consistently efficient and effective decisions. They may even begin to rely on analytics to offer suggestions to complete their daily work.

Finding these business moments requires more creativity and imagination that we commonly use for searching out analytics use cases. There always seems to be bigger fish to fry, but it’s within the minutiae of everyday moments that we can begin using analytics to truly differentiate our business, drive new efficiencies and win valuable new customers.

Of course, it also requires the ability to connect the right datasets with the analytics tools that can drive the best possible outcome in real time. Customer data, for example, is often static, so we need the ability to combine contextual data with historical data in a way that allows us to create valuable insights. 

When we can connect our imagination to the moments we take for granted each day, and leverage DataOps to make analytics ideas a reality, we can begin rolling out innovative use cases to propel our business to new heights.

To learn more, please visit: https://www.qlik.com/us/executive-insights

About the author:

As the CDO at Qlik, I walk in our clients’ shoes by making sure Qlik's data processes, management and tools are aligned. If you’d like to discuss how you can start democratizing data in your business with a modern data architecture using proper data governance processes and tools, please get in touch with me at [email protected].