Last week we focused on how important it is to understand Customer Data, and what value it has for any business. Customer Data can help the education travel industry to understand patterns and start forecasting - both of which are essential for any marketing strategy. Let’s focus on more points on how this Big Data helps.

Customer Turnover

No one likes to admit this, but it is a fact of life: customers can stop using your services and switch to a competitor. In this case data comes to the rescue again! In order to avoid past mistakes you need to understand what they were in the first place. It might not even be a mistake but simply a better offer or proposition from your competitor. Sifting through your data can help you pinpoint the last interactions of customers who stopped coming back, which in turn helps you find a pattern you may want to avoid in the future. If a recurring student stops coming to your school, it may be more fruitful to analyze the data of their last experience as this may shed light on what went wrong. This data can help you retain more customers for more consistent profits in the future.

Turn to Your Socials

Social Media platforms are the best resources for data. Sifting through this data can help you identify your target market, who your competition is and what they offer, customer behaviour and more importantly, it helps you uncover what your market wants and needs. Through social you not only gather new information on travel trends, and new teaching methods, but also what students are looking for as an add on to learning any subject. Taking advantage of trends that are tied to your market, helps you get ahead of the curve and aid you in providing what the market will want in the near future.

Data Sharing

While we strive to keep data from our competitors, the same concept should not be taken into consideration within our own company. Making this data available throughout the company ensures that the people who might have use for it have it at their fingertips. Data needs to be treated the same way you would a student complaining about his accommodation. You do not keep the complaint to yourself, but share that knowledge with the accommodation team in order to make it right and to follow up on the complaint.

The Beauty of Automation

Some companies are still uncomfortable with automation. The idea of letting a machine make all the decisions is scary, however, that is a bit of an extremist view. While we are nowhere near the stage where a company can run solely on machines, automation can still help your staff in the day to day running of your system, by sorting out the menial tasks so they can focus on what’s more important. Instead of having people sifting through all the data, you can now use software that analyzes keywords so that you only need to deal with the information that is relevant to you.

Accepting the importance of data is the first step towards better revenue for your company; analyzing such data may seem daunting, but the benefits you reap will show a great return on your investment.