How Data Literacy Can Make or Break Your Company’s Future

If data is as obscure to most executive-level managers (C-suite) and senior management as research indicates, companies not innovating will be in a lot of trouble soon, if not already. The current COVID-19 pandemic has done nothing but accelerate the impending doom.

Why? Because dropping revenue and productivity while keeping payroll status quo has squeezed all the margins. Today, more than ever, we are being asked to do more with less.

• Sales and marketing professionals are beginning to see their pipelines drying up. More emails to “all” the prospects aren’t going to cut it. What can they do?
• Call center operations are experiencing higher than usual incidents, i.e., customers need more assistance, while the stay-at-home orders have reduced the staff needed to support the spike. How can call center supervisors and managers still deliver great customer experiences while managing down the costs?
• Product managers are continuing to execute on the product map while being fully aware that the post-pandemic world is going to ask for greater innovation in products and experiences. (For example, Yelp is seeing a 64% drop in their top search category for restaurants [1]). How can they innovate in this highly subdued revenue environment?
• IT has been asked to cut costs. How and where are they going to cut costs while keeping their staff as is? 

Let’s put it in simpler terms. Say a CEO has $1 million to spend. Who should she give it to if maximum return is the goal? Which group/projects will generate $100 million from this spend? Could this be an exercise the CEO and leadership team pull together in isolation sitting in the boardroom? No, not really.

What would they need to know to guarantee that they get $100 million in return? The individual groups of product managers, marketing managers, operations folks and IT managers need to propose their best bets. But how would they come to their best bets?

Data. Yes, data holds the key to better understanding many things. To mention just a few, it helps companies figure out:

1. What worked and what didn’t? It will assist in planning for future launches.
2. Who are the best and worst customers when creating a stratified call routing strategy? This way the organizations can deliver relevant and cost-optimized experiences.
3. Which customer group needs incremental marketing triggers to buy, and which groups won’t buy irrespective of the trigger? Data will help deliver a stratified and targeted marketing plan optimized for ROI.
4. What feature sets and experiences have the highest potential to be a must-have experience, thereby delivering potential candidates for tomorrow’s innovation? 

We can see how data plays a crucial role in giving the necessary insights. But how are the product managers, marketing managers, call center supervisors, IT managers and finance teams going to get those insights from data? They could line up outside the data and analytics team (D&A) office, awaiting their turn. However, the resources of D&A teams are limited, which makes it difficult or impossible for them to scale to assist every decision-maker with their day-to-day decisions.

If these employees (the product managers, call center supervisors, etc.) need to add value to the business – now and in the future – they need to learn the language of business. They need to self-serve data via do-it-yourself business intelligence tools and learn how to put that data to work to answer their questions and inform their bets. That doesn’t mean they all need to become data scientists. They just need the right level of data literacy (DL) to meet their own needs.

According to recent research, just 21% of the global workforce is at the right level of data literacy required for their particular job. From our client experience, we have rarely seen more than 10% of employees at the right level of DL.

So, how are your employees going to get data literate? Would sending all the employees to a mandatory data science course – perhaps one run by your local university or your internal D&A team – do it? Probably not, because:

1. Data literacy is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Different persona, perhaps mapped to a unique job title and function, will need different levels of data literacy. A campaign manager’s data literacy needs to be quite different than a customer support agent’s DL needs. Typically, we see 6-8 personas in any given organization.
2. Data literacy and training. Data literacy isn’t achievable just by training. Most of us can relate to taking an online or even an onsite/offsite course, taking notes in the class and surprisingly, forgetting all about it once returning to work. Unfortunately, that’s the story in most corporate training programs. You lose what you don’t use. And in the case of new skills, the application has to be immediate, such as what one does after taking wedding dance lessons. Similarly, data literacy training has to be tied to a real use case for it to stick. Additionally, data literacy is not a trivial skill, and so the training needs to be recipe-driven, as well as taught in the business context. It also needs immediate high-impact application to make it a real tangible skill for an employee.
3. Data literacy needs to be supported by three Ds to drive results. Data literacy, if done well – i.e., customized by persona, tied to a real use case, recipe-driven and set in a business context – will drive high literacy within your employees. However, unless the employees have easy access to good data, they won’t be able to apply their data literacy skills to derive insights. This means that data literacy needs data maturity. Additionally, unless leadership is data-driven, sees data as an asset and applies data-driven decision-making, data-literate employees won’t find the space to play. Data literacy is supported by data-driven leadership. Lastly, unless there is a systematic and transparent process of decision-making based on data and facts, data-literate employees won’t be able to influence big decisions, thus handicapping the data culture. Data literacy is put into action by data-driven decision-making.

If you are in a leadership role and want to thrive after the pandemic ends, you need your employees to learn the language of business. Empower them now, invest in upskilling them, and you will receive high return on your investment as they start saving money and making incremental gains using data. And remember to make sure you tie data literacy to real projects.

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Reference

1. https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/yelp-lays-off-1-000-142122079.html