Businesses of all sizes are collecting more data, continuously, than ever before. But many – particularly small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) – have trouble understanding where their data sits, how to connect and act on it, how to manage it, and, most importantly, how to drive value from it. 

While there’s been a huge surge in the past few years of SMBs migrating their data to the cloud, we recently surveyed more than 800 C-suite executives, VPs, and directors from SMBs and found that many struggle to understand how to get the most out of their data. In fact, the survey found that only 35% of respondents use cloud-based analytics. And, there’s a big difference between simply storing data and maximizing its value.

Most of the SMBs that I speak with know that their data is valuable, but they struggle to extract value from it. They want to be a data-driven business because of the competitive advantage it brings. And recent research from Forrester supports it: advanced insights-driven businesses are 2.8 times more likely to achieve double-digit growth year-over-year when compared to organizations with more nascent data strategies.  

The research also found that more than half of the SMBs were unaware of what insights their data could provide and had little to no understanding of the ROI that analytical tools drive. This means there is an enormous opportunity for SMBs, as processing and analyzing large volumes of data to identify unique insights is no longer exclusive to larger companies with considerable resources. So, let’s take a look at what’s possible. 

Data and Analytics in the Cloud 

With cloud-based data analytics and data-driven insights, SMBs can enhance operations and lower operational costs, elevate the customer experience, and, ultimately, drive considerable growth – a competitive advantage that’s crucial to a segment experiencing rapidly evolving customer expectations and restricting budgets. 

1. Transforming Customer Experiences & Retaining and Recruiting Customers:

Data and analytics tools can transform the customer experience for SMBs. These tools help businesses plan improvements to existing products or services, highlight customer service successes and opportunities for engagement, and be more responsive to customers and their needs – both quickly and profitably.

SMBs can harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics powered by machine learning (ML) to identify new customers and expand their customer base, improve customer retention, and transform customer or product data into valuable insights that inform and enhance marketing strategies. SMBs can use these tools and technologies to uncover and forecast hidden insights, trends, metrics, and key drivers in data, which can help them better anticipate customer needs and evolve how they interact or reach customers.

For example, an SMB with an e-commerce site can deliver personalized recommendations in real time that target customers more accurately with ML-powered personalization services, deploying curated recommendations and intelligent user segmentation at scale. An SMB can also create customer service chatbots that can answer FAQs and automate customer journeys. In the cloud, SMBs can even create ML predictions in a visual interface that allows them to predict foot traffic, workforce staffing needs, inventory stock, and more.

2. Reducing Operational Costs and Increasing Scalability 

Finding a cloud provider that maintains an infrastructure designed to scale storage resources can help SMBs meet fluctuating needs, preventing businesses from the time-consuming and often costly task of setting up data warehouses or data lakes. With this infrastructure, the onramp and usage of data analytics services – everything from data ingestion and organization to data monitoring, accessing, and analyzing – can be done in days instead of months. In a cloud infrastructure, an SMB can run and scale analytics in seconds, not minutes, which saves time and money. These operational efficiencies enable SMBs to shift resources to more important tasks and help them better deliver products and services to their customers.

3. Automating Business Processes

Cloud data and analytics services can help SMBs free up their time by automating time-consuming and tedious efforts. Many providers offer automated cloud solutions, such as fraud protection, document processing, and predictive maintenance that help businesses avoid the costly, inefficient processes around extracting or managing data. For example, automating document processing through AI/ML tools speeds up business processes and can improve decision quality and reduce costs. For SMBs, day-to-day business processes involve managing a massive number of documents with information and data that is critical to making decisions. Yet, these businesses process most documents manually, an approach that’s time-consuming, expensive, difficult to scale, and error-prone. But, intelligent document processing automatically extracts information from documents – of various types and formats – quickly and with high accuracy, without the need for machine learning expertise. 

4. Creating New Revenue Streams

With SMBs generating more data than ever before, there are new opportunities to leverage that data in exciting ways for others that might find value in it. As data-driven decision-making becomes more important, businesses of all sizes are leveraging external data to help boost and enhance their business. Many SMBs may just be sitting on the data that another business could benefit from immensely and has not previously accessed. With the right cloud tools, SMBs can monetize data, packaging and selling the data being generated to their own customers as well as entirely new customers. Essentially, this enables SMBs to generate entirely new revenue opportunities with the data on which they may already have collected.

Getting Started

SMBs are already using data and analytics services to generate measurable value and make tangible improvements to their business, but some are yet to catch up. To help define a data strategy to maximize the value of their data, SMBs should work with a cloud provider that has a fully integrated analytics stack and a mature set of analytics tools optimized for performance and cost. 

These tools can help SMBs anticipate market trends, make better informed decisions, forecast and increase sales, and accelerate their business. In the end, this spells SMB success.