December 2, 2023

Aditi Mascarenhas

Leveraging BYOB for Enhanced Data Mastery in E-commerce

Explore BYOB's impact on E-commerce with our guide. Learn how its AI-driven data analysis transforms decision-making, optimises customer journeys, and masters complex data for strategic business growth in a competitive market.

Table of contents

Introduction

If you’re here, you’re probably a little too familiar with the perils of keeping an EComm business afloat. It’s a dynamic market you’re dabbling in. Between the constantly evolving customer preferences, dynamic market trends and cutthroat competition- you’re stuck trying to keep up.

Here’s a truth bomb for you (you should write this down, maybe even tattoo it on your arm)-

The ONLY way to stay in the game is to make Informed, DATA-DRIVEN decisions.

But you already knew this.

Data reigns supreme. It is feedback. By understanding the information hidden in your data, you will find precise solutions to increase efficiency, refine your operations and ultimately form a more successful, customer-centric business strategy.

Easier said than done…

With the amount of generated data being thrown at you every day- from transaction logs and cart abandonment rates to social media engagement and SEO results - keeping track of all the dashboards and spreadsheets is enough to give your analysts many-a sleepless nights.

Tackling the unstructured data is even more daunting a monster- product images, descriptions, reviews, customer support calls. This is Multimodal data, and it is messy. It does not fit into neat spreadsheets. It often requires more complex processing like categorisation, tagging, and conversion into a structured format suitable for analysis.

It's clear that the challenge isn't just collecting data but also cleaning it, integrating it and finally making sense of it so you can drive strategic decision-making.

Here is where BYOB comes in.

What is BYOB?

BYOB is an AI-driven data analysis tool that -

eases the data analysis process - making it more accessible and less time-consuming, and
allows for more complex data analysis that was previously too complex.

Its core capabilities lie in its ability to seamlessly ingest, preprocess and analyse a wide array of data types, including both structured and unstructured data (multimodal).

As a user, you can interact with the data, ask insightful questions, and extract useful information to facilitate decision-making.

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upload-BYOB works its magic-decision make

This allows for two interesting new ways of working-

‘Conversational Analytics’ - where your analysts can now upload data or connect to their existing database and converse with the chatbot, asking it to perform various analyses - exploratory, prescriptive, predictive, etc.

An Automated Monitoring of Performance Metrics - where BYOB will continuously monitor important metrics and alert you if there is a change that is of concern to you.

For a more in-depth understanding, read here: link.

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Let’s get specific.

What does this mean for your E-Commerce Business?

Why You Need BYOB and How It Will Make Work More Interesting For You

In your E-Comm business, there are broadly three fundamental (data-related) difficulties holding you back:

Data is Complex and Underutilized
Data is Siloed
The Time Lag between Problem Identification, Analysis, and Decision Making

Let’s understand each of the problems and how BYOB solves for each of these problems in interesting ways.

The Underutilized Data Problem

You only use a fraction of the data you generate. The rest is too messy or unstructured. This data requires complex algorithms to decompose, structure, categorise, and tag.

Consider the amount of potential insight that could be extracted if you could better analyse and understand-

Click and Mouse Tracking data from your Website
Product Reviews, Social Media Comments, Feedback, Email Sequences
Product Images and how they affect purchase behaviour
Customer Service Calls and Interactions

Where your analysts would have spent weeks making sense of this unstructured data, BYOB easily processes and understands this data. You can upload this data and simply prompt it for insights:

“What is the average duration between mouse hover and click on major CTAs?”

“What is the response rate and customer engagement level with different types of email content?”

“How do image variations (colour, size, angle) impact user perception and purchase intent?”

“What are the common themes and sentiments expressed in product reviews and social media comments of XYZ product?”

Without having to do the laborious manual analysis, BYOB will provide insight and show you the code used to perform the analysis.

The Siloed Data Problem

Another untapped avenue for insights, is integrating data that is otherwise siloed between departments or (again) because it's too difficult to integrate. In a simpler database, we would use joins to merge two datasets and co-analyse data, but what do you do when the data is multimodal?

BYOB comes to the rescue here as well. You can upload audio files and text files and analyse them together. Or a spreadsheet and text data. This would be near impossible without AI. BYOB does it within seconds.

Unlocking this new level of complexity to your analysis allows you to ask more complex questions like:

“How do the placement and quality of images on product pages affect user interest and time spent on the page?”

“How do sentiment trends in customer reviews correlate with changes in sales volume for specific product categories?”

“What is the relationship between specific keywords used in customer feedback on social media and the corresponding return rates of those products?”

“What is the impact of customer-generated content (text and images) on social media on the brand's overall online sales performance (sales data)?”

Imagine the specificity with which you can understand each part of your business now.

The Time Lag Problem

This is the most obvious of the data difficulties. The process of analysis involves a multitude of steps and takes time. In an industry where timing can be a critical factor for success, any delay in deriving insights from data can result in missed opportunities and decreased competitiveness.

Your data analysts would have spent the most time in the grunt work that is cleaning and processing the data. BYOB does this in seconds, freeing up time for your analysts to focus on higher-order thinking and decision-making.

As an added bonus, because BYOB allows for conversational analytics, there is no need for technical coding knowledge. Stakeholders or Product Managers don’t have to go to an analyst every time they need to analyse and understand data to make decisions; they can just ask BYOB:

“What are our sales projections for the next quarter?”
“How can we optimise our inventory? Which items are being overstocked, and which items need restocking?”
“Create Funnel visualisations showing where customers are dropping out in the checkout process.”

BYOB gives you the ability to process and analyse data quickly and accurately to facilitate decision-making. This gives you a competitive edge in the market. It will make your business more efficient and harness the full potential of their data.

Let’s dive deeper.

How BYOB ties into your ECommerce Customer Journey

The single most important goal for your e-commerce business is to make your customer journey as frictionless as possible.

This journey, from discovery to purchase and beyond, is a complex web of interactions, decisions, and touch points - all generating a vast amount of data. The key to mastering this lies in understanding and leveraging this data to strategise and make decisions effectively.

At each stage of the customer journey, there are metrics to evaluate performance and reroute in a way that makes the transition between stages more seamless.

Here’s a table that will help you see some specific use cases for BYOB at each stage of the Customer Journey:

Use Cases

CUSTOMER JOURNEY STAGE	KPIS	MAIN DATA ANALYSIS PROBLEMS	HOW BYOB IMPROVES IT
AWARENESS Initial brand or product discovery through various channels.	Traffic Sources Ad Impressions	Difficulty in tracking and attributing sources of awareness accurately.	BYOB enhances source tracking and attribution analysis, providing clearer insights into effective channels.
CONSIDERATION Engagement with the website/app, product exploration, and comparison	Page Views Time On Site Bounce Rates	Challenges in understanding customer behaviour and preferences.	BYOB offers deeper behavioural analysis and customer segmentation to tailor the browsing experience.
CONVERSION Decision-making and purchase process	Conversion Rates Cart Abandonment Rates	High cart abandonment rates and identifying friction points in the checkout process.	BYOB identifies and addresses friction points, optimising the checkout process for higher conversion rates.
RETENTION Post-purchase engagement to encourage repeat purchases	Repeat Purchase Rates Loyalty Program Engagement	Difficulty in measuring post-purchase satisfaction and loyalty.	BYOB analyses customer feedback and engagement, enhancing loyalty programs and retention strategies.
ADVOCACY Customers promote the brand through reviews and referrals.	NPS Customer Reviews Referral Data	Tracking and leveraging customer advocacy effectively.	BYOB helps analyse customer sentiment and identify potential brand advocates for targeted campaigns.
OPTIMISATION/ PERSONALISATION Continuous improvement of the shopping experience	Personalization Metrics A/B Testing Results	Integrating diverse data sets for a personalised customer experience.	BYOB enables real-time personalisation by analysing a wide range of data, offering tailored shopping experiences.

Similarly, we can look at how we can use BYOB in each department.

How BYOB can be used in Department-Specific Workflows

BYOB's versatility in handling diverse data types enables tailored solutions for every department, enhancing their operational efficiency and strategic insights.

Let's explore how BYOB's innovative approach transforms department-specific workflows, driving informed decision-making and optimised performance.

Logistics and Supply Chain

Main Goal: Efficient and timely product delivery with cost optimisation.

Primary Metrics: Delivery time, shipping costs, order accuracy.
Secondary Metrics: Inventory turnover, supplier performance.

Traditionally, you would manually analyse and track delivery times, shipping costs, inventory levels etc. This would lead to missed opportunities, inefficiencies and delayed responses to supply chain issues.

BYOB automates real-time tracking and analysis of metrics like delivery time, shipping costs and inventory turnover rate. You can utilise its capacity for predictive analytics to anticipate inventory needs, helping you optimise stock levels and reduce holding costs.

Product Development

Main Goal: Develop products that meet market needs and drive innovation.

Primary Metrics: Time-to-market, development costs, product quality.
Secondary Metrics: Market feedback, product lifecycle.

Typically, it involves manually gathering market research and customer feedback, followed by a slow, iterative process of analysing this data to inform product design and development.

BYOB not only automates the gathering of market insights but also rapidly analyses this data, focusing on primary metrics like time-to-market and secondary metrics like product lifecycle. This means quicker, more informed decisions in product design, ensuring alignment with current market demands and customer preferences.

Marketing

Main Goal: Drive brand awareness and product demand.

Primary Metrics: Conversion rate, customer acquisition cost.
Secondary Metrics: Engagement rates, campaign ROI.

Marketing teams often manually sift through campaign data, analysing metrics like conversion rates and customer acquisition costs, which can be time-consuming and may lead to outdated strategies.

BYOB provides real-time insights into primary metrics like conversion rates and secondary metrics like engagement rates and campaign ROI. This enables immediate strategy adjustments, optimising marketing efforts for current market dynamics.

Sales

Main Goal: Maximise revenue and customer acquisition.

Primary Metrics: Sales volume, revenue, average order value.
Secondary Metrics: Customer lifetime value, sales conversion rate.

Sales data analysis typically involves manually reviewing past sales records to identify trends and patterns, a process that can be slow and may overlook emerging trends.

BYOB offers real-time tracking of sales metrics, enabling you to quickly identify and respond to changing sales patterns and opportunities. This dynamic approach helps to quickly adapt to changing market conditions, maximising revenue and improving customer targeting.

Customer Support

Main Goal: Deliver exceptional customer service and support.

Primary Metrics: Customer satisfaction score, response time.
Secondary Metrics: Issue resolution time, customer retention rate.

Customer service departments often manually review customer interactions and feedback to gauge satisfaction levels, which can be time-consuming and reactive. Data is often in the form of audio files and text-based reviews. Analysis is complex as the data is multimodal.

BYOB automates this analysis, providing instant feedback on customer satisfaction and service efficiency. This proactive approach enables quicker identification of service issues and more rapid implementation of solutions.

Technology and IT

‍Main Goal: Ensure robust, secure, and efficient technology infrastructure.

Primary Metrics: System uptime, security breach incidents.
Secondary Metrics: User satisfaction, IT support efficiency.

IT departments typically manually monitor system performance and user feedback. BYOB offers automated, continuous analysis of system performance, quickly identifying potential issues. This proactive monitoring ensures higher system uptime and better user satisfaction.

Finance and Accounting

Main Goal: Manage finances efficiently and ensure regulatory compliance.

Primary Metrics: Cash flow, profit margins, cost efficiency.
Secondary Metrics: Budget adherence, financial forecasting accuracy.

Financial teams often spend significant time manually processing and analysing financial data, which can delay financial reporting and decision-making.

BYOB automates the analysis of financial metrics, providing real-time insights into cash flow, profit margins, and budget adherence. This leads to faster, more accurate financial decisions and streamlined financial management.

Human Resources

Main Goal: Attract, retain, and develop a skilled workforce.

Primary Metrics: Employee turnover rate, time-to-hire.
Secondary Metrics: Employee engagement, training effectiveness.

HR departments typically analyse recruitment and employee data manually, which can be slow and may affect strategic decision-making.

While you previously missed out on insights from unstructured data like employee feedback in open-ended surveys or interview transcripts, BYOB can analyse unstructured data, gaining deeper insights into employee sentiments and experiences. It also provides rapid analysis of HR metrics like employee turnover rate and time-to-hire. This leads to more informed HR strategies and improved employee engagement and retention.

Conclusion

Without tooting our own horn- BYOB is the key to unlocking the full potential of your data.

It transcends traditional analytics, offering a sophisticated yet user-friendly platform for integrating and interpreting complex data sets with minimal technical expertise requirements. Whether it's refining product strategies, optimising customer journeys, or enhancing operational efficiency, BYOB equips you with the insights needed for informed decision-making.

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