“The biggest challenge is ‘info-besity’—incalculable amounts of data, but not enough bandwidth or time to digest it.”
“The data that will bring value to you depends on what consumer signals are relevant to answering your business questions.”
How is the customer data you collect going to be used to meet a business objective? That is the first question you must ask, says Patricia Aragón León, chief digital officer at one of the world’s largest cosmetics companies. And the reason that question is so important is that today we are drowning in data. “We finally have more than enough data to play with,” says Aragón León. “That creates its own sets of new challenges. The biggest challenge is ‘info-besity’—incalculable amounts of data, but not enough bandwidth or time to digest it.”
To address this challenge and to be sure you are spending your resources on the data that is relevant to your business processes, Aragón León recommends building these three best practices into the way you collect and use data:
Ask the right business questions: Data comes from many sources, such as points of sale, ecommerce websites, email, social media, customer care data, ratings or reviews, and third-party data. But data is not magic. “Each platform has a role and purpose to fulfil, and consumers behave differently on each of them,” says Aragón León. Without key business questions and objectives to provide context for the data those platforms generate, the data will have no meaning. It just becomes channel data without a purpose.