Data-Driven Decisions: Why data is the key to business growth

If you wanted to increase your monthly sales to beat year-on-year growth targets, what would you do? How would you book more appointments? Which services would you highlight? Do you need more staff or equipment?

How do you even answer these questions? Based on gut instinct, opinion or experience is probably the wrong answer. That allows subjectivity to creep in. What’s needed instead is figures and statistics showing what is working and what needs improvement. 

Successful companies meet and exceed their growth targets by investing in data collecting solutions because they know important business decisions must be based on reliable data.

What are the advantages of data-driven decision-making?

Data allows businesses to see how they are truly performing and helps them plan for the future. Data-driven decision making produces actions that are:

• Objective: When decisions are based on facts and quantitative data, they are not influenced by subjective assessments that may be inaccurate.
• Measurable: When decisions are measurable, you can track progress to meet your targets and deadlines.
• Agile: When decisions are agile, you can adjust them to strengthen what’s working or to identify and correct what isn’t.
• Comprehensible: When your decisions are comprehensible, it’s easy to explain them to your team or justify them to management.

Most importantly, data makes you aware of situations that you wouldn’t otherwise know about. For example, data may show that one of your branches is underperforming far below others in a particular area. A further look at the data will show which are your best performing services, that could then be offered at a reduced price at that branch.

Collecting business data isn’t only about sales. Use it to improve customer satisfaction, helping create repeat customers. Good data may help you better allocate resources or realise that you need an extra employee at peak hours to meet demand.

Knowing the benefits of data-driven solutions, it’s time to learn how to make them. TIMIFY collects valuable data on all areas of a company’s operations to serve as the basis for data-based decisions.

5 steps to data-driven business decisions with TIMIFY

1. Set goals

To make data-driven decisions, you need to identify your goals. You can’t plan for the future without knowing where you are in the present. Data about your company will help you look back and identify specific areas to target. If you haven’t yet, take a look at your TIMIFY Statistics Dashboard to generate some ideas and make a list.

2. Find relevant data

With TIMIFY, all your data is in one place. Regardless of whether your bookings were made on your website, social media channels, individual booking links or by telephone – TIMIFY records it all. View statistics on how customers book appointments, such as splits on bookings via your widget or by phone, or which times of day are most popular for bookings.

Your dashboard shows much more than just appointment statistics. View which services are most popular, track sales over time, see which days or hours are busiest, or numbers of cancellations. You can also view statistics about your team and resources, such as figures on sick days, most used equipment or which employees are most popular with customers.

Apply a range of filters to find and view data as you wish. With the Branch Manager tool you can view global statistics or filter by branch or region. See your top performing branches, the most frequently booked services and your most sought-after resources.

3. Interpret your data

Once you have the data, you need to interpret it. Perhaps you realise that months with the most no-show appointments also had the fewest customer payments in advance. Now you can set a goal to reduce no-show appointments by encouraging or incentivising customers to pay at the time of booking.

With Branch Manager you may discover a peak in bookings during lunch break hours at a branch in a busy business district. This might influence how you schedule your social media ads to attract new customers during prime booking hours. 

4. Plan a strategy

With all the data and relevant reports, you need to think about how you will achieve your goals. What actions will you take? Define a period of time in which you will implement your decisions so that you can make adjustments if you’re not hitting targets.

TIMIFY offers a variety of useful tools to help you set up a strategy for achieving your goals. If you need some ideas, checkout these 10 ways to boost your financial return from TIMIFY.

5. Measure your success

Just as you used the Statistics Dashboard to identify your goals, use it to measure the progress of the data-driven changes you have implemented to achieve them.

Setting a goal, interpreting data and planning a strategy are important steps, but you’ll never know how well you’re doing if you don’t track your progress. 

Set up comparisons across set time periods to see how your original data compares to different phases after implementing changes.

Most importantly, feel the excitement of getting closer to achieving your goals, safe in the knowledge you have the key data that is crucial to developing your business in future.

The next time you need to make a decision, make sure it’s backed by data from the TIMIFY Statistics Dashboard. By trusting your data and using it to guide your decisions, you can grow your business, gain a competitive advantage and acquire loyal customers.