Knowing the odds

Today in The Register was a great article on cheating on online poker which was only discovered by some very interesting data mining.  It highlights the importance of analysing data for trends but also looking for those events which are so unlikely it may highlight something wrong with your business.  In this day and age everything is monitored from sales to emails - so there is little excuse for not doing some simple analytics on these figures.

Let us take an example such as sales.  In this digital age it is getting harder just to pick up the phone and speak to someone but it is still important to focus on your key performance indicators. The thing to do is to write down all the information that is available to you, for instance time email sent, time reply arrived, who it was to etc etc.  You can then write down what the questions are you want to answer, for instance who is the slowest customer to reply? Who never replies? If I send an email to a customer at 5PM on a Friday what are the chances I will get a reply?  These are important questions as you can then hone your sales process so that contact is made at the right point, you know when you should be chasing and when you should be waiting.

In this brave new world, information is king and whether you are a large or small company it is important you use every aspect of the information you have to your advantage.  Your task for today is write down all those processes in your business which you could measure or have questions about?  Link the questions with the measurements and then find a way to get those figures.  Then with a little intuition set the context for those figures - context is KING in statistics.

Good luck!