Unlocking the Full Value of your Premium Data Investment

Few would doubt that modern-day organizations are working in an extremely competitive business environment. There is more choice of providers, products, and services than there has ever been. Consumers and businesses alike can switch quickly and easily between providers should standards fall short of what is expected.

Businesses have to work much harder to instill loyalty among their customers, protecting the company’s market share and bottom line. Organizations of all types and in all sectors are constantly striving to add value to their customers, to better understand their concerns and requirements and to provide to them a first-class experience.

The most effective way of delivering such a first-class customer experience is to make use of all of the data available to a business. This will include an organization’s own proprietary data, for example, that which is held in its CRM platform and other enterprise systems, but also a number of external data sources too. Sometimes this data is sourced by the company itself but often the organization will pay another business to access highly valuable secondary data. The provision of this secondary data is known as premium data services.

Such premium data services come in many different forms but essentially a premium data source is a paid-for service that provides a business with different – and ideally more insightful – data sets to which they can normally access. But premium data services are not cheap and many organizations are not getting the desired return from their investment in such services.

Squirro has recently launched a new whitepaper, ‘Maximizing the ROI from your Premium Data Investment‘, which outlines the different types of premium data services available and explores how Squirro can unlock the full value of that investment, and, in turn, deliver an improved customer experience.

Selecting a Premium Data Service

Choosing a premium data service that will add value and provide tangible business benefits to an organization can be hard. There are so many different options available, services that are unique to a particular industry, some that you access via market reports, and others that you pay a monthly subscription for.

There are very many options available and we won’t cover them all, but it’s important to provide an idea of the different groups and types of premium data service in the market.

Industry-focused data providers – while Financial Services (FS) is perhaps the sector most known for its use of premium data services, it is by no means the only one. Manufacturing, construction, retail, and most other industries all have firms that collate and supply data on that specific sector.

Focusing for now on FS though, there are providers such as Refinitiv, Bloomberg, and FactSet that are used by tens of thousands of FS providers all over the world. They provide data on deals, M&As, company expansion, senior appointments, and much more. While these are all seen as very valuable, it isn’t always straight forward to integrate these data sets with an organization’s own CRM and proprietary data. Some providers have APIs to facilitate this, but many don’t. Further still, simply having access to see the information doesn’t always result in being understood in the context of an important business problem.

General research providers – these organizations look at markets in a more general way, looking at different industries and territories. They compile data into paid-for reports and three of the main providers are IBISWorld, Statista, and eMarketer. However, these reports are invariably unstructured data meaning that most CRMs cannot integrate this data to analyze alongside the company’s proprietary data.

Industry analysts – these businesses are focused mostly (but not exclusively) on technology and are viewed as being highly influential in the technology buying process. There are hundreds of analyst organizations around the world, but the three biggest global firms are Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. All work in a similar way – their analysts study their respective markets and then produce whitepapers and reports which are available to buy. As with other types of premium data service, analyst reports are unstructured and mostly unable to be commingled with other data sources.

The Importance of Data Commingling

Data insight is highly reliant on context. Analyzing 20 different data sources, each in isolation, will not deliver anywhere near as much insight as when you commingle those data sources together. Therefore, so many premium data sources are not delivering the ROI and true value that they could be. The data is unstructured and not able to be commingled properly with other data sources. Organizations have to look at their premium data services in isolation, meaning that much of the insight held within this data is not being utilized.

Some premium data services have APIs or elements of automation that allow a user to integrate this premium data with their own propriety data, but this is not the norm. That’s why Squirro’s augmented intelligence solutions have proved so effective at unlocking the value of premium data services for organizations in different sectors and countries all over the world. Squirro adds structure to unstructured data which means that text-based reports and content can then be fully integrated into a CRM platform.

The user benefits from Squirro’s fully customizable client cockpit and instead of accessing premium data via a terminal or inbox, it is incorporated directly into the client cockpit. This commingling of data is highly effective and allows users to get a much deeper insight than before. It can be accessed in one place and in real-time. There is full contextual insight and users can really unlock the full value of their premium data investment, understanding customers and markets better and in doing so delivering superior customer experience.

Given that some subscriptions to some premium data services can cost tens of thousands of dollars every month and that reports based on premium data can cost anywhere from $500 to $50,000, it stands to reason that any organization would want to get as great a return as possible on that investment. Unfortunately, many are not doing so.

For further details as to how Squirro can help your organization unlock the full value to be found in premium data, then please download our new whitepaper, Maximizing the ROI from your Premium Data Investment.