Published on the 09/11/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
More than seven in ten Australian organisations currently use data analytics to support operations, and while more plan to follow suit, deployment is slated only for certain areas…
A local survey by Fifth Quadrant, commissioned by Verint – a company which describes itself as selling “actionable intelligence” systems that help clients optimise their work forces and practices – found that 71 percent of Australian organisations are currently using data analytics.
A further 14 percent plan to use data analytics in the coming year. Just 2 percent of respondents said they had no plans to deploy analytics.
The greatest perceived benefits derive from support for decision making and to inform future strategy.
Steve Nutall, research director at Fifth Quadrant, said that organisations were no longer reliant on “hunches” to inform decision making, instead; “Now we know what we know.”
The business units which make most use of analytics today are customer service, marketing and sales he said – with contact centres often rolling out analytics systems to help agents support or cross sell to customers.
Perhaps disturbingly however only 17 percent of respondents said that they used data analytics to inform product development.
This suggests Australian enterprises are ill prepared for the advent of more human centred design, which has been described by analyst Forrester as “the customer experience practice of choice” for 2016, identifying Telstra, Accenture and Commonwealth Bank as local leaders in the field.
Instead of focussing on using analytics to support future design, Australian enterprises seem bent on using customer analytics to support existing operations rather than to shape the future.
Brian Donn, senior vice president and general manager for Verint in APAC, said that the return on investment discussions with current customers and prospects often hinged around a desire to cut costs and drive revenues.
The sheer variety and volume of data that might be available in the future however could be much more widely leveraged, if organisations can source the skills and successfully integrate new sources of data with legacy systems.
Donn said that in the future organisations would not only be able to analyse existing customer data, real time contact centre conversations using speech analytics, even videos and social media to optimise decision making and operations, they would have access to more data courtesy of the Internet of things.
Verint, which has been widely deployed by banks and insurance companies, believes there is far more data that could be analysed.
According to Donn the opportunity for the insurance sector is particularly significant, predicting that in the future insurance companies would likely mandate customers provide data from an in-car chip which detailed their driving patterns, in order to “get a reasonable premium.” Similarly he forecast a rise in the amount of data that would be available for analysis from personal fitness bands.
