Why do businesses collect data? Put simply, to improve.
Take your website and Google Analytics as an example. Google Analytics captures data about your website and its users. You then analyze this data and use it to improve your website.
But what happens when you have heaps of data coming from lots of different sources every day; as most enterprise businesses do?
It becomes increasingly difficult to get the data into a format that is easy to analyze and use in a way that can drive positive change for your business.
When businesses take uncoordinated approaches to store data from many sources, it can result in quality inconsistencies – lowering the trustworthiness of the data.
This is where enterprise data management (EDM) comes into play.
The definition of enterprise data management is the ability of a business to precisely define, easily integrate and effectively retrieve data for both internal applications and external communication.
So, in layman’s terms, the ability of a business to capture data, bring it together, and action it to improve internal processes and customer communications.
With businesses having to manage on average an extra 40% of data per year, EDM has now become an operational need for many enterprise businesses due to the sheer scale of data that they collect.
Take Walmart for example, the US megastore and retailer collects more than 2.5 petabytes (2,500,000 gigabytes) of data every hour just from customer transactions. With so much data coming from just one source, Walmart is a prime example of why businesses need to place EDM at the top of their priority list.
I think it is important to note here that data security also plays a huge role in EDM. This includes the ability to accurately and safely transfer data among partners, subsidiaries, applications, and/or processes. But we will go on to talk about this a little more, later on.
EDM and physical spaces
When it comes to physical spaces or venues, there are many methods for data capture that range across different technologies and systems. Examples can include point of sales (POS) systems, WiFi analytics, Bluetooth tracking, customer reviews, and loyalty schemes.
When you have so many systems in place, integrating the data becomes a challenge, and if you can’t integrate the data, you will struggle to analyze it effectively.
In order to drive positive change, businesses need to be able to effectively capture, analyze and action data to help fuel decisions, increase efficiencies and shape company direction. And so, data needs to be standardized, converted into a useful form, and stored where it is secure and accessible.
EDM solution for your physical space
Purple offers a complete enterprise data management solution for your physical spaces.
Now before we carry on, let me remind you of the definition of EDM.
EDM is the ability of a business to:
- Capture data by pulling the relevant information from your preferred sources.
- Bring the data together safely and securely in one place ready to analyze.
- Action data to improve internal processes and customer communications.
Let me tell you how Purple ticks every one of those boxes.
- Purple captures data from your physical spaces through guest WiFi. When visitors connect, Purple compliantly captures their data via a captive login portal. This data can include name, contact details, date of birth, gender, location, footfall, dwell time, the frequency of visits and much more. If visitors choose to login using their social accounts you have the ability to see data based on their social interests.
- Purple stores all of the data captured in a centralized enterprise-class analytics platform ready for you to access any time. You can then segment and analyze the data through almost 6,000 report styles to identify trends and patterns in customer behavior.
- From the information you have analyzed you can feed this data into conversations around improving internal processes such as types of content you produce, CSM and Sales guidelines, and the optimization of physical spaces. You can also use the customer demographic data collected to improve external customer communications through email and SMS campaigns using a seamless logic flow.
- Purple offers a range of connectors to allow for this data to integrate seamlessly, in real-time, with existing systems. This prevents businesses from falling into the trap of losing valuable insights due to looking at data in isolation. By collating a variety of data leads to a greater understanding that can then be acted on to drive business objectives forward.
Data security
I briefly touched on data security earlier in the post. This isn’t something to be skimmed over.
Understanding your customers and how they interact within your venue is very important – I’d say absolutely necessary – in being able to improve your venue efficiencies, and so, the customer experience. But the method of capturing the data has to be done lawfully.
The misuse of customer data such as selling data or emailing a customer who does not want to be a part of any campaigns can result in “Data Conflicts”. These conflicts can, if not dealt with professionally, result in the brand losing credibility and legal action being taken.
Purple is compliant with global data regulations. When visitors connect to the WiFi, they are presented with short and easily digestible terms of business and privacy policy. The policy details everything from location tracking to data capture, and marketing preferences. Not only this, but users can also login into our My Data portal and manage all of their data preferences themselves.
To conclude, if your business is not already using an EDM system, allowing you to better understand who comes into your stores. Your competitors are.