Going on holiday and being abroad might feel like a long-lost pastime these days, but if you can remember what it was like, picture this scene.
You’ve just landed on the hot, dry runway and as you step out of the plane you’re hit with a wave of warm and dry heat which is in some part unbearable and yet, so lovely. You head straight to the hotel and drop your bags off. You’re starving from a long flight and head out to get some food. You find a lovely spot. Warm sunshine, lively surroundings and people relaxing around you.
You see someone to your left enjoying a fruit cocktail which looks remarkably like it could be strawberry flavoured and you think to yourself, ‘I’ll have me one of those”. There’s a menu on the table and you’re ready to find this cocktail and make your order.
But wait. Of course, the menu is in a foreign language and you start to panic.
Now, if you’re in Spain or France, perhaps you can rely on your high school French and spot the words ‘cóctel de frambuesa’ or ‘coctel de fresa’. You can quite confidently guess that one of these is going to be your strawberry cocktail – only was it fraise or framboise?. You’ve got a 50/50 chance, so you go with your gut and luckily, you get it right - enjoy your drink.
However, what happens if you’ve gone further afield and and you’re visiting somewhere like Japan? You’d likely be presented with; いちごカクテル, ビール and ワイン. Now, be honest, can you even spot how many drinks are written there? Let alone which is the one you want.
In the long list, you’d probably have a single digit percentage chance of selecting the correct drink in this scenario - truthfully, you’d probably just be grateful to have picked a drink to quench your thirst.
So let’s complete the story. You review what you’re looking at and with no other source of reason to listen to, you have a ‘hunch’ and you boldly point your finger to the line of symbols you so hope is your strawberry cocktail.
Seven to eight minutes go by and the waiter returns…
He gives you a bowl of hot soup.
DOOH!
Now this perhaps isn’t enough to ruin a holiday (well, it might be for some), but the analogy is useful to consider when you think about in your approach to understanding your digital data.
Frankly, a lot of people in business do not, either from a lack of education or time, truly understand all the details behind their data. They will look at the numbers and think they know what they mean and where they should focus their attention. The problem is, if they don’t seek to understand the detail behind the numbers or the stories these tell, they will get themselves into tricky situations and make the wrong decisions.
Trusting your gut can often work, we’ve all had life scenarios where we’ve felt the power of the gut, but when you’re needing to make data-based decisions, rather than emotional decisions, going with a ‘hunch’, can often be founded on nothing evidential and can lead teams down the wrong path.
This is not good business – whether your guess is only slightly wrong or way off the damage potential is the same
So, allow us to plug our data dashboard 4Front, which takes the guesswork out of the equation.
To think back to our drink analogy, 4front acts as your language translator. Our data dashboard takes all your data and presents a clear picture of what these ‘foreign’ or ‘unknown’ data points actually mean for you and your business. Our team of scientists, trawl through all the lines of data, or the menu items in this case and decipher which are the foods and which are the drinks. Our team will not only pinpoint the Strawberry Cocktail you’re interested in, but they will also introduce you to a Pina Colada and explain why it is the only drink to meet the occasion.
Our 4Front dashboards provide you with the true stories behind your data which help you make the right business decisions.
If you’d like to understand more about how we do this and what value this can have for your business, do get in touch, we’d be delighted to unlock the true potential of your data for you.
And once, our lives are back to normal, perhaps we might even be able to celebrate your new found successes with a Strawberry Cocktail?
Or a Pina Colada…