Businesses of all types and sizes are gathering a vast amount of data about their customers – and this can be invaluable when it comes to delivering a tailored and exceptional service.

However, it’s no good simply gathering the data; you need to be able to analyse it, understand it, and make changes based on what you discover. Research published by Forbes has found that more and more businesses understand that they need everyone in their organisation to understand and utilise analytics to a certain degree.

In fact, 54 per cent of those surveyed said that they want to reward employees for identifying opportunities through analytics and then acting on them.

Deriving business insights from customer data isn’t something that people naturally know how to do, though. This means that embedding continual learning and development in this area and across all of your staff is vital.

Another way to make better use of customer data is to ensure that you share your vision of how customer data analytics can transform your company to everyone who works for you. This can be linked to developing a data-first approach to all of your business decisions.

Using incentives to encourage your employees to embrace the adoption of analytics is another option open to you, and one that Forbes states “also sends a signal to employees that it’s okay to experiment and try out new ways of approaching problems with data”.

When you’re broadening your use of customer data analytics, you need to ensure that you choose the right methodology. We recently explained what we look at when adopting solutions for our clients.

The first step is always identifying and clearly defining the business problem you want to address with analytics to ensure the solution you put in place does what’s required.