I once again had the opportunity to sit down with Tim Houlihan, host of Motivation Insiders podcast, to discuss my journey of sharing the benefits of utilizing data as a tool when making business decisions. In the episode titled, The Remarkable Power of Data: Design, Relationships and Strategy, we discussed the four major ways companies can use data to support their success.
With my piece, I specifically covered program design, decision making, building value, and the “Excellence Approach.”
Program Design
Choosing a program for your company begins with defining your goal. The best strategy to define that goal is asking yourself “What does success look like?” From there, we can articulate the best behaviors that lead to that success. Using data already gathered can help support that those behaviors will get you down the right path.
After you determine your goal and the behaviors that play off it, you can run a pre-program analysis. Once the main factors are determined (target audience, goals, objectives) the next step would be short-term testing to highlight which specific mechanisms achieve that ultimate goal.
Decision Making
Data collected from a certain program can influence other business decisions. Not only does data help gage the ROI of your company, but data from a rewards program can help companies gather a better customer profile. Knowing your customers better allows you to mold a program that fits their needs.
Building Value
The more knowledge you have about your target audience, the more value you can give to them. The data that’s been collected allows for customization when designing a program. This provides a better service and motivation for people to do activities in the best interest of all parties.
Excellence Approach
One of my methodologies is called the Excellence Approach. There are four phases that are involved in this framework: Exploration, Envisioning, Execution, and Evaluation. The most critical phase is exploration because you are identifying goals and exploring the data. During envisioning, you create a design concept to test during the execution stage. Finally, in evaluation, we monitor the program to see if we are meeting our objectives. This program is circular, so changes can be made to adhere to your specific goals.
Conclusion
The goal of my quest is to stop looking at programs through one lens and realize that data can help answer questions to create an individual program that best suits your company. If you want to learn more about my journey, please give The Remarkable Power of Data: Design, Relationships and Strategy a listen!
