By Richard Mullins, director at Acceleration Middle East & Africa

As every marketer knows, we have more data about our customers and how they interact with our brands at our fingertips than ever before. We have a deluge of real-time data flooding business, from a wide range of systems and sources—internal CRM databases, data managed by agencies, data from channels such as search, social, ad-servers and web analytics tools, sales, stores and many more.

Despite all of this rich and real-time information, many business’s and marketers still struggle to turn data into insights that are easy to digest and activate across the business. The organisation may have teams working on different channels and touchpoints who have a clear view of their own data, yet there is little alignment between them. Each of them is like a person feeling a different part of an elephant in the dark. 

Most organisations have rolled out technology to support and measure customer engagement at different channels and touchpoints. The real challenge is to zoom back and throw some light on the elephant, to get the full picture. It’s not enough to understand how channels perform in isolation – we need to see how they interact to deliver against the organisation’s business and marketing goals, how they affect the customer experience and how each contributes to overall return on investment. 

This is where the next generation of data visualisation tools have an invaluable role to play. These solutions allow senior executives and marketers to turn the data from different marketing systems, channels and touchpoints into purpose-built dashboards that offer a view of how their business is doing. It creates a visual story of the value of their consumers interactions with different channels at the various steps of their customer journey. 

This helps them to better understand how channels and touchpoints contribute to customer acquisition, engagement and retention. They can get a real time view of what is happening across channels, as well as granular insights of what is occurring in each separate channel.

Increasingly, these tools are being used across multiple teams as a means of providing a common ‘truth’ that can be shared throughout the business. The use of dashboards and reports can be shared and discussed between various disciplines, enabling better strategies and cross functional collaboration. It also means that there is less requirement for data analysts to run reports and provide insights, especially given the demand and how little supply there is for analytics and data science skills in the market.

The tools allow users to pull disparate data sources into a single view, compiling reports and dashboards that allow them to easily add the dimensions, metrics and segments that matter to them. These visualisations can be viewed in real-time and manipulated according to the user’s needs.

Data is becoming an important competitive set for any business, and as marketers strive to use every contact with a customer as an opportunity to drive engagement and build the brand’s relationship.  Yet, making use of data to inform tactics and strategies is difficult if one cannot make the data accessible to decision-makers, whether they are campaign managers and planners or the CMO. Data visualisation is becoming a must as we seek to democratise analytics and leverage consumer insight to deliver richer, more relevant and timelier customer experiences at every touchpoint.