Data mature organizations see over 3X improvement in revenue with shorter time to market, greater profit, and exceptional customer loyalty

Heap, the leading digital insights provider, announced research findings from newly released IDC white paper, sponsored by HEAP Analytics, “How Data Maturity and Product Analytics Improve Digital Experiences and Business Outcomes” (doc #US49598722, August 2022). The white paper verifies that data maturity – meaning how well a company uses data and leverages it in its decision making – provides up to 2.5X increase in overall business outcomes for leading teams versus lagging teams. This average includes increased revenues and profits, better efficiency, and higher customer satisfaction reflected in NPS scores. Revenue was particularly influenced and was 3.2X greater for the most mature companies, who also saw 2.4X times greater profit and 2.4X greater customer loyalty as measured by NPS scores. The independent report surveyed over 600 product builders and data scientists across company product teams.

The findings showcased in the IDC white paper also showed that data maturity “leaders” experiment before making roadmap decisions or changes, while “lagging”–those that are most behind in data maturity–are more likely to have no mandate to run experiments. Data-driven decision making regardless of stage leads to positive outcomes.

The IDC white paper addresses how factors across people, processes and technologies affect relative data maturity and increasing business results.

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Key findings include:

• 98% of leaders have a good to excellent understanding of customer journey friction points, while only 29% of lagging–the least data mature companies–reported they have a good to excellent understanding in this area.
• 84% of leader teams get answers in minutes or hours compared to only 3% of lagging. Leaders are more than 2X as likely to report that leveraging data for personalization was either “easy” or “somewhat easy” compared to lagging.
• 76% of leaders have a single source truth for data compared to only 3% of lagging firms.
• 89% of leading teams agree or strongly agree their organization celebrates learning from experimentation while only 23% of lagging teams have the same level of conviction.
• Over 80% of leaders have fully automated data validation, have clearly-defined policies on who can access the data, and have the ability to control data management.

“In today’s challenging market, efficient growth drivers are more important than ever,” said Ken Fine, CEO of Heap. “The ‘How Data Maturity and Product Analytics Improve Digital Experiences and Business Outcomes’ white paper indicates that data-driven insight is a catalyst for business progress leading to profit and revenue increases, shorter time to market, better NPS scores and improved operational efficiency.”

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Yet, despite huge returns, the IDC White Paper shows that large opportunities for improvement still exist:

• While 62% of leaders have “complete” or “strong” access to data, only 38% of lagging organizations have this same degree of access
• 73% of leading companies believe that they could do more with the data that is made available to them.
• Nearly 70% of all companies only use data to measure the success or failure on major initiatives
• 69% of all companies say that decisions are often driven by the HIPPO (Highest Paid Person) without regard for data
• More than 65% of lagging companies lack access to tools like session replay or tools to identify specific areas of friction in the user journey.

“These findings should be a wakeup call for businesses who want to efficiently grow their business and retain their customers for longer periods of time,” said David Wallace, IDC Research Director, Customer Intelligence and Analytics. “As reported, businesses that are most data mature enjoy a 3X increase on revenue versus companies that are the least data mature. Our study illustrates not only the importance of data maturity but why a data driven culture is critical to success today, under any market conditions.”