With the A.I revolution underway, data in the recent decade has gotten a new makeover. The benefits are impactful and ever expanding. In the past few years, there has been a shift of emphasis towards social analytics, while development in the internal business data realm has stagnated. This is an unfortunate circumstance because aa majority of customer insights stems from Internal Data analytics. This is why Semeon has been focusing more and more on internal business data.
But what exactly is internal data? It’s exactly what you think it is. Internal data is data generated from within the company that only the company has access to. This includes, but is not limited to:
-
- Surveys
- Web analytics
- Internal reports
- Emails
- Customer service requests
- Chatbot Messages
- Call Center/Sales/Focus Group Notes
- Employee Reviews
Any textual document that a company has can be utilized. Unfortunately, it rarely is. This in-depth analyse can add a layer of expertise to any organization. In the following section, we will outline some of the core benefits that can be derived from such data.
Benefits of Internal Data
There are two main benefits that come from analyzing internal data. Firstly, enhanced customer insights. Despite what any marketer or salesperson will tell you, understanding the customer is still a problem for many brands. A study from IBM and eConsultancy found that 81 percent of companies say they have a holistic view of their customers. And yet, only 37 percent of customers agree that their favourite retailer understands them.
This is a huge discrepancy, but artificial intelligence is now being used to create more actionable insights that are allowing brands to better understand the needs of their customer. The main driver of this enhanced customer understanding lies in internal data. Ai has given companies the power to analyze huge amounts of data from numerous sources across departments. But be careful because this is not an easy feat.
Secondly, Ai is powering mass personalization. Now, more than ever before we are able to customize marketing campaigns to a larger audience and this goes much further than putting the recipients first name in the subject line. Now it is about predicting what the customer wants and providing it to them at the right time: 65% of B2B buyers are likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t make an effort to personalize its communications to them. Ai is giving brands the ability to act quickly off of actionable insights — often in a predictive capacity before the consumer knows what they want and internal business data has the power to create these actionable insights if properly analyzed.
Difficulties in Analyzing Internal Data
It’s easy to say that a company can derive a lot of value from their internal data, but one can not talk about the benefits without mentioning the difficulties. For this, it’s important to recall the four V’s of big data: value, variety, volume, and velocity. They say that in the knowledge economy, information is our most valuable commodity. But in a company, information is often coming in excessive amounts, from every direction, and at an intense speed. I challenge you today to consider where all the data is coming from in the company you work for. Whether a small business or a large corporation, chances are you have a lot of it, and chances are that you don’t utilize a lot of it. The vast amount and unceasing accumulation of different types of consumer data are often neglected or a nightmare to analyze for businesses.
Furthermore, the other main barrier to analyzing internal data is the fact that most of it is unstructured. What exactly is unstructured data? Briefly, Unstructured Data is a term that “…refers to information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner”. Luckily with the advent of technology, these barriers are getting squashed and a data revolution is underway. First, we had the gold rush, then the oil rush, and now it’s the data rush.
Conclusion
Only analyzing public data is a trap for most large companies. At Semeon, we use the latest technology in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to understand data for companies. Although we can understand and create insights from most data companies possess, we focus on deciphering internal data from surveys, emails, chatbot messages, web analytics, and any kind of notes whether they be from sales, the call centre or focus groups. We realized years ago that for many brands nowadays, the sheer amount and complexity of data is proving to be an obstacle. This is unfortunate when you consider all the benefits that come from utilizing and leveraging it.
So what does this mean? This means that there is technology that is allowing companies to get the same insights out of their data instantaneously without needing to dedicate entire teams and countless hours to the task. If you enjoyed this article and have been thinking about ways to derive the highest value from your internal data, think no further. The people over at Semeon would love to provide you with a free consultation on the best practices companies are using nowadays. Contact Semeon Analytics today to learn how you can implement AI into your marketing strategy today!
