Customer analytics plays a vital role in the success of any startup business. It helps you understand the market you are in better. You also get to study individual customer behavior. This knowledge is indispensable when planning new business strategies from your findings. But it often requires a lot of effort on your part to implement it.
And with all the other work that your small team needs to manage, analytics is often one of those tasks that take a backseat. In such situations, you can opt to outsource the work instead. But how do you do it the right way? Let’s take a closer look.
The Case For Outsourcing Your Startup’s Analytics Needs
With it being a critical business task, you might understandably be hesitant about outsourcing your analytics needs. However, there are several strong reasons why you should consider the move.
Access To Expert Analysts
You might ask what’s the difference between your and an outsourced team’s analytics capabilities. Well, depending on the provider that you sign up with, there is a lot. These companies have years of experience doing data analytics for different industries.
Thus, they have refined their processes and can handle every aspect of the task more efficiently. That ensures that you can get the relevant information faster for your business needs. Beyond that, these experts can probe deeper into the data and bring out insights that you might not be aware of. All of that can help you make better use of the information that you gain.
Increased Customer Centricity
And what can you do with the expertise that an outsourced analytics team can provide? One specific example is helping your startup business become more customer-centric. Here, you will need to deal with how fast customer behavior changes during your analysis.
Image from The Brocks Group.
To overcome that, you will need to study customer data regularly to find new patterns. With an outsourced team, that study happens in the background. You can then focus on developing new strategies for each customer segment based on the data. Additionally, the analytics team can arm your customer support agents with near-real-time data.
In turn, all of that information you gain can help you deepen customer relationships. And with the outsourced analytics team providing deeper insights, you can better plan each customer engagement to serve that purpose.
The Challenges Of Outsourcing Customer Analytics
But before your startup business can reap those benefits, there are a few challenges that you need to resolve when outsourcing data analytics. The most obvious challenge here is the loss of control over your data. That is, in fact, the main reason why many startups are hesitant to go with it.
Image from Egnyte.
This one is an unavoidable cost for the effort. After all, third-party analytics firms need to access your data to do their work. Luckily, many established providers are well aware of the issue. Because of that, they have developed comprehensive protection strategies to ensure that client data is safe.
Nevertheless, you would still want to work more closely with the provider to polish these strategies further. Here, you need to set clear guidelines on which data they can access. Note that you might have to make some compromises to give them the best access to the data they need.
Control Over The Startup Business Analytics Model
Another concern you might have when outsourcing data analytics is not having control over the algorithm used to process your data. Since it is part of their service to you, the provider retains ownership of that algorithm.
Image from CodeShip.
The issue here lies at the end of the outsourcing contract. Since you do not own the model, you cannot use it for future data studies. Thus, you will need to look for another method to use for those.
To solve that, you will need to negotiate with the provider for after-contract access to these algorithms. That might involve extending the contract or seeking a new one with different terms. Whichever is the case, you should consider whether the arrangement would suit your long-term needs.
Improving Your Startup Business Analytics Outsourcing
Aside from the above, there are alternative ways you can overcome these challenges. One is by choosing to outsource only the execution of the analytics work. Here, you retain control over the design and planning of the analytics strategy.
That does mean that you will have to do some extra work building the strategy before handing it over to your analytics partner. On the flip side, you get to retain control of the analytics methodology. This strategy is handy if you plan to implement a long-term analytics project.
Image from 3Pillar.
You might wonder if you would miss using the provider’s expertise fully because of this. Don’t worry, as they can still take on an advisory role and help you flesh out the analytics strategy you will utilize. It has the added advantage of them helping refine your analytics model into something that better fits your needs.
Ensuring The Important Contract Details
It is also essential that you carefully craft all the provisions in your outsourcing contract directly tied to your data analytics operations. In particular, make your service level objectives clear. Here, you need to provide the following elements.
- Key performance indicator: The exact indicator to be measured
- Service level objective: A thorough description of the KPI
- Measurement interval: The period in which the specific data is processed.
Be clear on how the outsourced team will report and communicate these KPIs. Communicate often with the external team to ensure that the analytics process goes smoothly.
Supporting Your Startup Business In Outsourcing Analytics
Note that you also need to provide support for your outsourced analytics team. Here, Virtua Solutions’ virtual assistants will gladly be of help. Our VAs can serve as liaison officers between you and the external team. This helps them focus on the work while keeping that communication lines open.
Additionally, we can help with the analysis itself, assisting in the data gathering and associated clerical tasks. With our help, your startup business can quickly go through all of that data and make meaningful decisions. Contact us today to get a strong start.