How African Tech Start-ups Can Leverage Predictive Analytics For Efficient Service Delivery
What is predictive analytics and how does it help businesses to improve their service delivery? Continue reading this post to find out.
Many organizations are seeking ways to offer their products and services to customers. The aim is to find an efficient way to save time and ease the processing of the orders. There is also the need to provide the highest quality of delivery at the expected time.
One major opportunity that most start-ups are not taking advantage of is the availability of data in the public domain. Also, they aren’t considering the internal data they are gathering to make business-intelligent decisions.
Organizations are drowning in an overwhelming amount of data. They know little or nothing about gaining insights from the data and turning them into actionable goals and objectives.
The purpose of data is to act with precision and less assumption. Doing this makes it possible for a business to thrive by reducing the possibility of making errors almost completely.
How To Gain Actionable Insights From Data
Data gathering
The gathering of data is the most rigorous step as without data, the ability to make a decision is hampered. Assumptions would thrive and there would be many gaps in the margin of errors. Before collecting data, the project’s scope in terms of questions to be asked in the survey, the duration of the project, field enumerators to be used, and the medium for gathering the data should be known. These tools are for gathering data Surveymonkey, Google forms, Microsoft forms, Hubspot, and Google analytics.
Data Cleansing
Data cleansing or wrangling is the art of removing unwanted items not needed in working with the data collected. This includes symbols, extra spacing, grammatical errors, etc.
Data Analysis
To analyze any form of data that has been collected, these tools are the most comprehensive in the marketplace, they include Microsoft Excel, SPSS, STATA, Python, R programming, MATLAB, E-views.
Data Visualization
Data visualization is the art of representing data in the form of charts for comprehension by stakeholders. Examples of tools for data visualization are Power BI, Tableau, etc
Business Intelligence
The action is taken having seen the feedback hidden in the data collected is called business intelligence (BI). This is the most important aspect to act with precision.
What is Predictive Analytics?
Predictive Analytics is a form of using records from past data collected over a while to determine what the future holds in the form of forecasts. Predictive Analytics is a branch of data analysis that helps to make decisions in the business world.
Tools for Predictive Analytics
There are free and paid tools for predictive analytics and they are numerous in the form of software applications. They can be utilized by anyone who has competence in gathering data from customers through surveys or from a database and knowledge of which tool is applicable to best analyze certain data.
Non-coding tools
- Microsoft Excel
- SPSS
- STATA
Coding tools
- Python
- R Programming
Application of Predictive Analytics
- Stock Control
- Staff Utility
- Price fixing
- Managing of Peak Times
- Determining call rates
The future of business will be driven by African start-ups that can use the data gathered to study the behavioral tendencies of customers and how to serve their needs with a greater level of efficiency. Check out other business articles on SME360 to help you grow your brand.
Emmanuel Otori has over 9 years of experience working with 100 start-ups and SMEs across Nigeria. He has worked on the Growth and Employment (GEM) Project of the World Bank, Consulted for businesses at the Abuja Enterprise Agency, Novustack, Splitspot, and NITDA.
He is the Chief Executive Officer at Abuja Data School.
