Data and Analytics

Data and analytics are more powerful than businesses trust them to be. It is high time businesses learn to unlock their true potential with the better use of consumer data and analytics. A few businesses, however, have embraced analytics as an important aid and talk openly. While most others are still struggling with trusting the power of analytics.

Data and analytics are increasingly guiding and shaping the way businesses behave.  They are powerful enough to deliver quicker, better outcomes in terms of decision-making, thus attracting accelerated investment from all sectors. In fact, analytics is not just seen as a business tool anymore. In ways, big or small, analytics also tend to have an impact on the choices we make as individuals as well as societies.


How To Access The Right Analytics Platform

We are rapidly moving towards a world that relies heavily on systems for making decisions. These systems feed on data to be able to provide you with the information you seek. However, the questions that arise in such a situation are, how trustworthy are these systems? Are they operating considering our best interests? How do we know, and hence trust, what these organizations are doing with this data? Is there a trust crisis looming above our heads? If yes, will we be able to take the required actions to avoid it?

The threat that we might end up facing is that companies may begin to ignore the interests of the customers and the benefits that retail insights can provide society with. This can create grave difficulties for the enterprises that do so. One way to combat this can be to have audit systems in place to ensure the transparency that is necessary for trustworthy analytics. Audit firms have ensured regulation in the area of financial reporting for decades now, and they can surely act as watchdogs for complicated data and analytics ecosystems as well.

We live in an age where crucial decisions that impact us directly or indirectly as individuals, societies, and even as enterprises are dependent on complex data analytics. Gone are days when decision-making was laced with bias and gut feeling; subjective decision-making is becoming more and more objective today. It is these data-driven analytics and insights that organizations rely upon heavily to enhance the consumer experience, mitigate risks, and improve operational efficiencies. Due to this considerable dependence of organizations on data and analytics for pretty much everything, the trust that we have in data is now being questioned.


From Our Data Perspective

At Xpandretail, we believe there are major reasons why the attentiveness toward this trust issue is increasing:

Analytics is rapidly becoming a crucial factor impacting business decision-making:

Studies conducted by us confirm that retail analytics has today become the main component of influence impacting decision-making in organizations, especially in the areas of new growth potential. Enterprises mainly rely on analytics for customer acquisition, improving customer experience, enhancing productivity, and mitigating risk, especially fraudulence. To support decision-making pertaining to all these areas, organizations adopt various types of analytics, ranging from traditional business intelligence to real-time analytics and even machine learning.

According to our survey, 50% of the enterprises agreed that they rely on some kind of real-time analytics and machine learning, while 49% said that they use advanced analytical tools, that go beyond static charts and graphs.


Indirectly or directly, many lives are dependent on data and analytics

Various businesses such as those in the areas of healthcare, banking, insurance, risk, automobiles, infrastructure, and security. Many depend on analytics to make decisions that can have a permanent impact on the lives of the individuals involved. Even low-risk businesses require both customers as well as their own executives to trust the analytics. Therefore, enterprises that impact the lives of customers based on incorrect or inaccurate analytics not only risk losing consumer trust (and the consumer as well), but also rattle the faith of the executives who depend on these to directly make those decisions.


It is difficult to trust something that one does not really “see”

Algorithms are intangible and their workings are invisible; they are too opaque for most individuals to understand or trust completely. The data and analytics ecosystems are only getting more and more complicated, given the involvement of various third-party providers. This leads to a lack of clarity that cultivates a sentiment of suspicion and mistrust among people.


Excessive dependence on data and analytics induces repetitional risk

Organizations that rely heavily on data and analytics are at an increased risk of jeopardizing their reputation in the public eye as there are a lot of companies out there that collect and sell private data without consumer consent. When people are targeted by organizations they don’t remember sharing their data with, the begin doubting the organizations they actually shared their data with. This, obviously, had quite an impact on the image of both the organizations, known as well as unknown.

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