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Web hosting Industry/Web hosts powers the world wide web. It is the major backbone of all that runs on the internet. The industry consists of companies that are primarily offering infrastructure for hosting and data processing. It is a huge and fast-growing industry forecasted to touch $204.6 billion by 2024. Thus, business intelligence is very crucial for Web hosting industry. Which is currently being overlooked or ignored at the moment by the business owners.
With my experience working with few datacenters and web hosting clients, I have noticed that they still maintain their data in the traditional manual methods and also use the limited analytics provided by the helpdesk/billing software that they are using. Considering the humongous volume of data they possess, there will be lots of valuable information about their business in those dark data. If utilized in the right manner will be providing valuable insights to grow their business further.
Importance of Business Intelligence
I shall explain this with a small example. Suppose, a subscription-based web hosting Company, was getting around 100 inbound leads every month. One month they did a marketing campaign and generated 200 leads that month. Out of these 200 leads, they onboarded 175 customers. Seeing the success of these campaigns, they started giving similar marketing campaigns frequently and the sales kept increasing. The marketing team’s performance was very impressive and highly praised.
Later, in the annual evaluation, the leadership noticed that the revenue had not increased in proportion to the sales conversion. All the teams involved, sales, marketing, operations and finance were asked to bring their historic data to the leadership to analyze what went wrong.
This analysis showed that, the majority of leads that were generated were converted. However, the real problem was with the clients churning in the following months as the product was not suited for them.
The leadership finally identified that the root issue was with customer retention. The higher churn rates within 1 or 2 months of usage was due to invalid marketing leads.
This example clearly shows that:
- Organization did not have track on the monthly increase or decrease in revenue. Which if they had tracked, this discrepancy would have been identified early on.
- Organization did not have track on the customer churn rate nor the customer retention rate. Which is also a very crucial metrics that directly impact the revenue.
- Sales or Marketing did not have visibility into the churn or retention rates.
- The marketing team did not perform a market study or segmentation. The campaign targeted the wrong audience. Right data study on customer behavior would have helped.
- Due to the delay in identifying the incorrect marketing strategy, there was a huge revenue wastage as well.
This example clearly shows that if you constantly monitor your company vitals, it will help you to take data-driven decisions, to avoid problems and work smartly. Rather than believing in the rule of thumb, let numbers do the talking. This example shows the importance of business intelligence for web hosting or rather for any industry.
How BI can help you
The importance of business intelligence has been at an increasing trend in these last few years. However, there are still many organizations who are not tapping their data potential fully or even partially. This data if rightly analyzed, the insights that they give on the historic, present and future trends of an organization will be invaluable. This analysis not just gives insights into the organization’s growth trajectory, but also, equips to take the right data-driven decisions at the right time. Also, the real-time insights help in identifying bottlenecks in operations, sales, support & finance departments. Thus, making the daily operations smooth for each of these teams.
With the current trend in data democratization, we need to spread a data driven culture within the organization. By data empowering the team, for every meeting your team can come prepared with the right analysis, as they already have the data to analyze their work and performance. Data does not rest in the hands of a few, but everyone has the required data analysis they need for taking well informed decisions for efficient work execution.
Unlike other industries, where a single ERP solution manages the entire functioning of the organization, web hosts normally depend on multiple applications to handle the billing, sales, support, helpdesk, livechat etc. Hence, making it difficult to analyze the data that rests on multiple tools. They tend to utilize the limited data analysis provided by those tools. Which often fails to correlate data and provide the right analysis. This data if combined and brought to a single platform, it will help in generating more meaningful insights. Pre-canned dashboards, that take data from multiple sources and shows just the important metrics can be leveraged.
Conclusion
As a conclusion, the significance of being data-driven is very important for any organization. The webhosting industry being a subscription-based industry and using multiple tools, has humongous data that’s untapped. Hence, they need to be leveraging the power of data to get informational insights, to steer organization to growth. This clearly shows how important Business Intelligence is for Web hosting.
