It’s hard to be a successful business if you don’t know your numbers.

I know that might be a cliche statement, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. How would you know you’re meeting your goals? How would you evaluate the success of a new initiative? Well, if you don’t have visibility into where your business stood before and after the change, you’d be out of luck.

You probably knew all of that, so here’s a second, way less cliche statement:

It’s hard to scale your business without frictionless access to your data.

With hundreds of customers, you need systems in place to quickly provide context, surface trends and insights, and answer questions. You need systems that fight friction. Don’t believe me? Take a moment and think about the software you’re already using to run your operations. The software that controls things like booking, sales, and inventory management.

These are fundamentally tools to create, edit, and view data. Let’s assume you run an ecommerce business. When one of your customers places an order, a new data point gets added to your ecommerce system’s database and propagates throughout:

1. A dedicated “order” webpage is created where you can view and edit order details.
2. The system’s reporting module now includes information about the order.
3. And assuming this was a returning customer, their “customer” page is updated accordingly.

If this hypothetical ecommerce system is any good, accessing the order data in any of these places should be relatively frictionless.

That’s just one example, but it should be pretty easy to spot this same pattern across each of your business systems. Each strives to create, edit, and view data (without friction) for specific functions within your business.

We tend to notice quickly when one of these systems fails to provide a frictionless experience. It’d raise some alarms if you were unable to easily pull up all orders awaiting fulfillment. And its certainly frustrating when the system’s reporting module doesn’t include a KPI that is relevant to your business.

As your business matures, it's less likely that out of the box software solutions will successfully fight friction. KPIs start to require data from different systems, making it difficult to know your numbers. Customer data gets spread across different systems, limiting your ability to provide a personalized customer experience at scale.

To remove barriers to growth, you’ll need solutions that are custom built to your business and customers. And if technology isn’t your expertise, you’ll need a partner to help you implement these systems. If that’s you, Intero Analytics and Automation can help.

Let's Fight Friction Together