Historical Data is a Thing of the Past. It’s Prime-time for Real-time Data.
In this special guest feature, Dan O’Connell, Chief Strategy Officer and a board member at Dialpad, takes a look at what will happen to organizations as they roll out real-time data capabilities this year– they’ll discover new ways to scale faster, fresh ideas to improve operations, and novel ways to reduce friction. Previously, Dan was the CEO of TalkIQ, a real-time speech recognition and natural language processing start-up that Dialpad acquired in May of 2018. Prior to TalkIQ, he held various sales leadership positions at AdRoll and Google.
Most of your data is worthless.
Okay, perhaps it’s not worthless—but it’s nowhere near as valuable as it used to be. The COVID-19 pandemic upended consumer trends and working habits. It changed the way we shop, socialize, work, and relax. Much of our existing data is representative of our pre-pandemic lives. Take seasonal demand. Are people going to flock to restaurants over the festive period? The truth is that we don’t know.
To thrive in the murky waters of post-pandemic life, organizations must harness real-time data that’s forward-looking and predictive. But that’s easier said than done.
Until very recently, organizations had predominantly backward-looking data. Take customer satisfaction. If you wanted to know whether your customers were happy, you’d send out an NPS survey or tack some CSAT questions onto your customer service scripts. Results would trickle into a database. At the end of the month, someone would crunch the numbers and report on performance. All of that took time. It wasn’t uncommon to receive April’s numbers in mid-May.
It’s the same story in other disciplines. You gathered financial, productivity, or engagement data through the month, analyzed it, and reported on it later.
Because data was backward-looking, you were stuck in a reactive cycle. The data said sales are slipping in the midwest? Let’s up your marketing. Employee engagement is down in the Chicago office? Let’s interview your managers to see what’s up. You were always playing defense, never offense. Worse, you were chasing after the ball. You could never get in front of challenges or opportunities.
These challenges aren’t exactly surprising. Executives understood the limitations of historical data. If you could have given them instant access to reliable, real-time data, they’d have bitten your hand off. But the technology just wasn’t there.
Accessibility was always a problem. Data lived in old, siloed on-premise systems. Occasionally, for things like satisfaction surveys, you even had to deal with analog records. And when you finally got access to data, you had to work out what to do with it. While data warehousing has been around as a concept for decades, plug-and-play services like Snowflake are relatively new. Then there’s raw computing power. We take the ability to crunch big datasets as a given, but it hasn’t always been that way.
