Companies that aren’t investing in their data and business intelligence capabilities are missing out on growth opportunities, says Perceptive’s Managing Director Daniel Shaw. He reveals how a powerful tool, Ada, is using data science and visualisation technologies to better tap customer behaviour.

What is Ada exactly?

Ada is a tool we’ve developed that provides businesses with a whole new layer of insight into customers through understanding their transactional behaviour, including how and where they’re spending their money. By combining Paymark’s EFTPOS transaction data – the largest of its kind in New Zealand, with over one billion transactions a year – with Perceptive’s data science and visualisation capabilities, we’ve created a powerful intelligence tool that allows businesses to explore and analyse how their customers spend with them and in their category, through a self-service dashboard complete with the ability to drill into and analyse the data in real time.

Why is it critical for businesses to build their intelligence?

A recent study by Forbes Insights highlighted that 85 percent of companies that are succeeding with data and business intelligence capabilities are seeing year-on-year revenue growth in excess of 7 percent. Less than a quarter of businesses who are data laggards reach that level of growth.

As the needs and expectations of customers continue to grow and evolve, data and analytics capabilities enable a business to identify these trends and move towards a stronger competitive position in the market. At Perceptive, we often say that business intelligence requires more than one source of data. Think of it like a jigsaw: one piece of the puzzle is not going to give you the full picture. 

Beyond a better understanding of the customer, data and analytics capabilities can fuel better decision-making through understanding what drives performance, optimising spend or resource allocation, and identifying and sizing new market opportunities, unlocking profitable growth. The challenge for many businesses is having the resources and expertise to crunch and analyse data to make it meaningful and actionable, which is why we created Ada. The difficult part’s done for you.

What category/brand-level insights can Ada provide?

We wanted to make sure businesses and brands could draw as much information from the data as possible, so we’ve created intuitive dashboards to help businesses:

• understand their business/brand’s transactional performance compared to the rest of the category
• drill into how these trends are changing over time
• compare their spend-per-visit to the rest of the category
• compare their frequency of visits to the rest of the category
• learn what percentage of spend is coming from new or returning customers, and how this compares to the rest of the category
• identify the impact of media spend (or other marketing activities) on transactional performance
  
  

What customer-behaviour insights can it provide?

The short answer is: a lot! Ada’s deep customer behaviour insights can:

• reveal customer loyalty dynamics in a business and across the rest of the category
• accurately measure a business’ share of wallet/share of spend within the category and provide a view into other brands or competitors within their customers’ buying behaviour
• identify differences that may occur between what customers say they’ll do versus what they actually do
• provide a detailed view of customers’ path to purchase and buying journeys
• unlock regional and location-based insights, looking at the movement of customers both locally and around New Zealand
  
  

Who is Ada for, then?

Ada’s a must for any retailer or consumer-focused business that receives card – EFTPOS, debit or credit – and/or online sales transactions from its customers. We’ve designed it to be customisable to each business, meaning we can incorporate additional data sources, such as sales data, media spend, share of search and net promoter score [NPS].

This allows marketers to see the direct impact of their marketing efforts, and customer experience teams to directly correlate NPS with their sales and customer-loyalty dynamics. For any business looking to gain a deep understanding of customer buying behaviour in their category and competitive market, including how
and where New Zealanders choose to spend their money, it’s a powerful tool that provides multiple ‘puzzle pieces’ to help build business intelligence.