Moving beyond gut feel: the power of data-backed decision-making

In today’s competitive telco market, the ability to make effective decisions at speed is crucial. Historically, many leaders have relied on a mix of gut feeling, experience, and strategies that have worked well in the past to navigate the complexities that exist and guide their strategic decisions. A 2019 Gartner study even found that over 60% of leaders are still using gut feeling to make major decisions affecting business performance. 

But rapidly changing consumer trends, increased costs, an ever-expanding competitor landscape, and the squeeze on margins are increasing the frequency and complexity of decisions. As such, experience alone may not be enough to hang all decisions in this changing world. It requires a holistic approach, one that considers all factors and utilises the volumes of customer and performance data flowing in. 

But there’s such huge volumes of input from so many sources that it’s near impossible for decision-makers to ingest, dissect, and understand all of the data. As a result, they are forced to disregard some of it. AI, however, can cope with all the data and identify the important insights and allow decision-makers to more easily consume the data they need to make critical decisions. AI-powered decision intelligence tools enable businesses to thrive in an era defined by rapid change, optimising the outcome of every transaction and interaction. Here, we take a look at 7 key reasons data-backed decisions are so powerful. 

1. Accuracy and precision 

One of the key advantages of insight-driven decisions is precision and accuracy. Data gives teams objective, impartial evidence that cannot be argued and isn’t subject to human error or biases. This becomes a source of truth, one that provides reliable insights into behavioural trends, customer activity, competitor performance, activity efficiency and other important metrics. Armed with this information, decision-makers can make strategic decisions efficiently and with greater confidence, as well as demonstrate the value and success of initiatives and new opportunities to other stakeholders in the business.

2. Business strategy 
The sheer volume of data available to telcos is overwhelming and something that, until now, has generally had teams solely dedicated to aggregating and analysing it to provide to decision-makers. This has always been a costly and lengthy process. AI has the power to review, categorise and present huge volumes of data at speed and scale, allowing decision-makers to get a complete picture of the market and landscape in a fraction of the time. More importantly, AI-powered decision intelligence platforms will highlight to teams the most important insights so they can quickly identify opportunities and efficiently build out effective business strategies. These AI-powered insights provide the extensive business intelligence needed to craft robust and effective strategy plans and roadmaps, as well as support ‘always on’ optimisation of KPIs. 

3. Agility and adaptability
Businesses must be able to adapt swiftly to keep up in today’s dynamic world. Data-driven decision-making and decision intelligence solutions give teams the agility and flexibility to do just that and adapt on the fly. Furthermore, AI-powered decision intelligence tools help businesses to quickly identify opportunities and fix issues as well as swiftly adjust strategies when market conditions change or when behavioural trends begin to evolve. 

For example, SourseAI’s decision intelligence platform Atlas provides a single source of the data truth for teams to review. All teams across the business can look at this constantly updating data view and consider the impacts of it in relation to their strategies and actions.

4. Customer-centricity 
It’s the era of customer-centricity and personalisation rules. As such, understanding your customers and meeting their needs is paramount and this cannot be done using gut feeling alone. Because every customer is unique and what they want changes by the second. Businesses must take advantage of the volumes of data that are available or else run the risk of creating generic strategies that miss the mark and don’t resonate with the customer. Achieving this goal helps to strengthen loyalty, boost customer lifetime value, reduce customer churn and more.

5. Risk mitigation
Data-backed insights are crucial to mitigating risks within the telco space. For example, decision intelligence tools allow you to plan appropriately so you can avoid such things as losing revenue through churn, costly marketing investment errors, and backing volume acquisition channels over quality acquisition channels. 

By rapidly analysing large datasets, AI-powered decision intelligence tools work to identify important patterns and trends, predict future outcomes, and forecast potential issues. These insights provide teams with a comprehensive understanding of activity and allow decision-makers to fully assess the impacts of certain actions before they invest too much time and energy into them. This significantly reduces the chance of costly mistakes and enhances overall business resilience. 

6. Rapid results
Planning and decision-making always involve some degree of testing and learning. One of the biggest challenges faced by telcos though is the time it takes to gain an accurate view of what is working and what is not. There’s just too much data to quantify and it often requires a lot of resources to review and report on all the response metrics. 

AI-powered decision intelligence tools such as Atlas help to fast-track this process, rapidly testing hypotheses and allowing teams to adjust, refine and optimise as needed. Fast delivery of hard evidence on performance metrics enables accelerated learning and fosters more valuable data-driven experimentation. You can also quickly and easily run small tests that elicit a statistically reliable success prediction before you commit to larger-scale budgets and resources.

7. Continuous improvement
By continually capturing data on performance and decision outcomes from many different sources, decision intelligence tools are designed with continuous improvement in mind. This constant flow of data is used to refine models and strengthen insights. In turn, this results in more accurate and valuable recommendations that support optimal decision-making.

Combine insights with instinct, power success
In a landscape where competition is fierce and technology and the market continue to evolve, it is essential to leverage data for decision-making. While intuition and previous experiences and learnings will always have a role to play, they are best utilised in combination with data-driven insights and decision intelligence platforms. This mix of human intelligence, practical expertise, and data-driven analysis will lead to the most informed and effective decision-making and strategising, setting teams up for long-term success.