3 Departments with Untapped Data Opportunities: CX, HR, and Sales

Digital transformation started in IT, but its next great leap in the enterprise will be beyond the server room and into the myriad departments that make up every large business. We know that each of those departments have been sitting upon mountains of data, and the first step—consolidation—is largely complete for most companies. Now, though, it’s time for an overhaul in their approach to that data.

Three departments in particular—customer service, human resources, and sales—are sitting on a goldmine of data. Now, it’s time to show those departments the potential they’ve yet to harness, and to do so, they need to ask some questions.

Power of the pieces for research & development

As companies have consolidated their data, they’ve emerged with piles of structured and unstructured information. Alone, those pieces can feel disjointed and of little use, but together, they could paint a picture that helps deliver business results.

Take a research and development (R&D) team as an example: it could have access to construction plans of new devices and their pieces, but they might not be aware that, somewhere in their company’s infrastructure, there are details from former projects that could inform new designs and applications. Tapping these data points could shorten product development and improve product lifecycles, but only if they’re known to the R&D team in the first place.

Individually, these pieces are disparate, but if they can access these dots and connect them quickly, they could be able to innovate before their competition.

Harnessing data in customer service

The new mountain of data also creates an opportunity to be proactive, rather than reactive, in harnessing information. This is particularly true for customer service teams, which need a new approach to how they view data.

Traditionally, the focus in customer service has been on collecting information, then answering relevant questions, but customers are tired of this. They are beginning to realize just how much data businesses should already have and don’t understand why they need to give all the answers.

For example, if a customer has been buying from a business repeatedly for several years, they expect nothing less than a personalized experience every time they email, phone or message with a question, yet they are often met with further queries for information they’re certain has already been shared. The overhaul of data in customer service now needs to focus on harnessing data quickly so that customers aren’t left to feel like they’re the ones with all the answers.

Customer service teams need to be equipped with the ability to see everything they need to and anticipate a customer’s questions. Otherwise, they will continue to spend their time endlessly searching, while wasting everyone’s time.

The uniqueness of each department’s data

Some teams could soon find that the data they’ve been filing away for years has unexpected benefits to them and their business. Look at human resources: most HR professionals would love to lean on decades of old files to determine the next best possible change to the company’s working practices.

Unfortunately, that has traditionally involved manually searching through archives, making the task appear burdensome and time consuming. That prevents them from even trying to look, which means HR teams cannot possibly be aware of the treasure trove of insights they could have access to.

They could be overlooking crucial information on employee performance, team resourcing and recruitment efforts that has been buried under the mountains of paperwork they deal with every day. In the data-driven age, HR teams have an opportunity to realize the unique value of the data they have accumulated.

Seizing the untapped opportunities

The digital transformation era has begun to show real results in the enterprise. Now, the opportunity is there for businesses to expand on these successes and use better data management practices and insight tools to take advantage of valuable data beyond the bleeding edge, in departments that existed long before the days of big data and the cloud. Doing so could be the key to total business transformation.