New | Using digital analytics to gain knowledge to gain power

Knowledge is power. It's an age-old adage. But these days the new adage is digital is power.

The more you know about your customers the better placed you are to sell the right product to them. The more you know about your business, the better placed you are to run it efficiently.

Digital gives you that power.

The Industrial Revolution taught us that in manufacturing. Mechanising a process is often more cost-effective and therefore faster and more profitable.

Digital offers the same game-changing power through analysis of processes and customer bases. A good example of mining data effectively is how mainland e-commerce giant Alibaba uses customers' commercial transactions on its e-commerce platform Taobao to establish credit records and conduct small and medium-sized enterprise lending. It's a classic cross-sell. If a business is growing it may need a loan. It is easier to forecast that if you have a line of sight on a company's sales. That means using digital analytics to gain knowledge to gain power.

Banks do this often with bancassurance, which is when banks and insurance companies form a partnership to sell insurance products through the bank's client base. If a customer is racking up a credit-card bill with wedding expenses it might be a good time to pitch life insurance products. If they are applying for a mortgage, home insurance cross-sells make sense. But that only happens if you have a really switched-on front-line staffer or if management has provided data analytics to trigger when the salesperson should be making a call, sending an email or an SMS message to a potential customer.