How well do you know your customer data? When you need to make a strategic decision, can you make it based on data, or do you need to follow your gut? In the security business, collecting data and making it visible can help you to run a more successful company. Below, learn what data visibility is and how through good customer data visibility, security companies can thrive.
Clear Line of Sight and Why It’s Important
Data visibility, sometimes called line of sight, is a measure of how easy data is to access and analyze. Poor data visibility often comes from having information scattered between multiple sources. Let’s say you need to know the status of each customer’s warranty and when the last work order for each was completed. That information needs to be actively pulled together, but it isn’t readily available.
At first glance, this may sound like a minor issue. After all, you do have the data; you can always compile the necessary reports when needed. However, the reality is that many businesses miss opportunities and threats because of an obscured line of sight. These are some reasons that high data visibility is important:
- Identifying Issues That Cause Dissatisfaction and Attrition: Leveraging your data on customers and your operations can assist as you identify issues that may be affecting your business. These may be reasons why customers are not as satisfied as they could be. They may even be reasons why customers are looking elsewhere for security services. Being able to find and correct these problems and concerns can improve customer loyalty and growth.
- Finding Opportunities for Innovation and Upselling: Similarly, those same data-based insights may help you to find paths forward for your business. You may be able to identify a class of customers that are likely to be upsold. Alternatively, you may notice a way you can streamline your processes and cut costs. When you have a clear line of sight to your customers and your business operations, you can make better choices.
- Making Smart Decisions, Easily: When you are planning the strategic future of your business, you can benefit significantly from having clear access to your data. However, this can be challenging if the data is spread out and disparate. In many cases, having poor data visibility leads to either ignoring the data or having an incomplete picture when making strategic choices.
Why Your Customer Data May Be Obscured
As mentioned above, the most common cause of low customer data visibility security companies experience is scattered data. For example, you have may one data source with your customer contact information, another for work orders, yet another for warranty records, and many other types in multiple locations or software platforms. The result is you need to pull information from numerous sources to get a complete picture of what is happening with each customer.
Another common cause of data obscurity is simply not collecting data. For example, if a customer calls and needs a work order to repair some equipment, how is that recorded? Is the work order simply submitted? What happens to the information on the customer’s complaint? Sometimes these key data points are simply being lost because there is no organized system for recording them.
How to Improve Visibility
Fortunately, improving visibility is simple, especially if you have the right tools. The key is to unify your data within a single, dependable origin. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you should only have one system that handles your data (although that is optimal); however, you should automatically aggregate it into one authoritative source.
A single financial and business management software solution can help you provide better support to your customers. These are some of the advantages you can achieve with a better line of sight:
- Improved customer experience
- Better business intelligence
- New opportunities for sales
- Better understanding of attrition
- Reliable metrics for tracking progress and performance
Get a Clear Line of Sight with Bold Group Financial Management Solutions
For improved customer data visibility, security companies can turn to Bold Group. AlarmBiller and SedonaOffice can help small- to medium-sized businesses and enterprise organizations with their billing, customer files, scheduling, invoicing, and more. By integrating these functions in a single system, security businesses can have better visibility and make more data-based decisions. Contact us to learn more today.