Now more than ever before, your operational strategy is crucial to the success of your business. After 2020 upended the comfortable ways that businesses used to operate, we’re in a “new normal,” and that means finding new ways to make your business as successful as possible.

We all know that your customers are the cornerstone of your business strategy. Taking into account the rapid shift and continuous evolution of consumer preferences and how they move around in the world, how can companies adjust their operational strategies accordingly? 

The answer is simpler than you might think: Your business operations need to be data driven.

Competition is rife in all industries, but this year feels a little bit more competitive than previous years. Businesses are trying to come back–and in a big way– from the interruptions that the lockdowns and economic shifts caused. This means that there is no holding back; they are putting it all out there in order to stay competitive. 

You can have the upper hand with the right data in place. By understanding your customers on a deeper level, your operations strategy almost writes itself; you become privy to information that used to be available only via market research surveys. In this case, you will be able to understand why your customers are shopping with your competitor, where your own customer experience is lacking, and how to fix those problems quickly.

The role of marketing is to draw in customers via clever campaigns and useful data, but the role of operations is to create, design, and implement products to live up to customer expectations. A huge part of this process involves understanding just what your customers are looking for and why. With the right data, you can gain deep insights into what your customers are going to want before they do. 

Let’s say that you are an agency working with a shoe brand that specializes in running shoes. Before 2020, their audience was pretty straightforward: people who run marathons. After 2020, you noticed that their consumers began to change. Where there were marathoners in abundance, they suddenly have an uptick in people who are just getting into fitness, whether it be walking or completing their Couch 2 5K programs. With this change in consumer behavior, the brand needs to shift, too in order to retain these new customers. 

While the shoe brand is innovating, their competition is still trying to market their product to marathon runners, not realizing that the new consumers have new preferences. Lucky for your client, the competitor’s customers are flocking to your client’s store instead.

Making sure that you have the proper amount of staff on hand on any given day is essential to running a successful business. If there isn’t enough staff on hand, then customers could be left waiting. If there is one person too many, then the business loses money on paying that extra employee’s wages when they weren’t needed that day. With the right data solution in place, foot traffic can be analyzed over time to help determine the busiest times/days of the year. This can be used to inform staff schedules and ensure that you have just the right amount of employees for any given day.

A big part of a successful business is having the ability to make the right business decisions. Luckily, we live in a time where tools and technology are available in abundance to predict, analyze, and execute whatever you need. Data-driven decisions are the equivalent of having a crystal ball on your desk and knowing the answers to a problem with some simple data sets. 

As great as this sounds, it isn’t always that simple. In order to conduct a data analysis and get those crucial insights, many businesses may decide to purchase large amounts of data without thinking first about the quality and how much they really need. This is where the problems begin. More often than not, businesses don’t need all of the data that was collected, but only a small portion of it. 

Not only this, but delivering said data is a whole other headache in of itself. We recognized that these were prevalent issues in the space, that’s why we came up with Gravy APIs. With Gravy APIs, you only pay for the data you need without wasting budget on too much data.

Crafting the perfect operational strategy for your business is hard work, but with the right data solutions in place, you can position your business for success without having to guess what your customers want, what your competitors are doing, and how much staff you need to help customers. For more information on how Gravy APIs can transform your operational strategy in the “new normal,” contact us to speak with an expert today.