If you want your company to stay ahead in this cut-throat, merciless competitive market, you must find the right data analytics consulting services that suit your business needs.
With the right data partner, you can make fast data-driven decisions, drive innovation, increase profits, and achieve steady growth.
Although it’s difficult to find the right data analytics consulting services suitable for your business, you can still uncover them quickly if you know how to look for them. But before we get into that, let’s see what data analytics consulting actually is.
What is Data Analytics Consulting?
Data analytics consulting involves helping companies use their data to derive actionable insights, allowing relevant stakeholders to make informed decisions.
The building blocks of this practice include:
Data Evaluation and Strategy
Data Engineering and Architecture (this involves building and using data lakes, data pipelines, data warehouses, and more)
Data Analytics
Reporting and Data Visualization
Data-driven Change Management and Adoption
Partnering with a data analytics agency can accelerate your business’s data usage capabilities and analytics maturity. You will get access to relevant tools, experts, and the knowledge to build scalable and resilient data analytical infrastructure.
Why are Data Analytics Consulting Services Essential for Your Business?
Data analytics consulting services will help you generate accurate and actionable insights so that you can make informed decisions based on facts, not intuition. Here are a few things data analytics consulting agencies can do that makes them essential for any business:
Helping your company make informed decisions
Improving supply chain and operational efficiency
Discovering market gaps to guide new product development
Getting better insights into your customers
Giving your business a chance to get a competitive advantage
Improving risk mitigation
Providing your company with relevant technical expertise and tools
What are the Benefits of Data Analytics Consulting?
Better Clarity
Data analytics will help you get a better, deeper, and clearer understanding of your business. Your company’s business operations, market landscape, supply chain, workflow, or sales—data analytics consulting services will extract accurate insights from your existing datasets to help you understand all these aspects. As a result, key business personnel can make informed, accurate, and data-driven decisions faster. There is no need to make decisions based on your intuitions.
Better Resource Allocation
Data analytics consultants will help you figure out where to allocate your financial and human resources to achieve the highest ROI. This way, your company can manage its budget, human resources, and investments better to achieve steady growth, maximize revenue, and utilize the workforce more efficiently.
Quicker Decision Making
Data analytics firms will help you build intuitive dashboards, showing you relevant metrics and insights in real-time. Access to relevant information will allow stakeholders to make timely decisions. Such fast and data-driven decisions will help you eliminate biased outcomes, reducing the risk of possible errors.
Accurate Risk Evaluation
Data consultants will analyze your company’s historical data, working patterns, and other in-house trends to help you more effectively identify and evaluate all possible risks.
This way, you can avoid making decisions that will lead those risks to the surface and manage the existing risky endeavors more efficiently.
Access to Predictive Capabilities
Predictive modeling, forecasting, and similar data analytics techniques allow companies to predict future trends, possible market conditions, and audience behavior. Companies can use these predictive capabilities to plan and optimize their business strategies to seize emerging opportunities and deal with future challenges.
What are the Key Types of Data Analytics Consulting Services?
Data analytics consulting firms offer many types of data analytics services, including but not limited to descriptive, predictive, diagnostic, and prescriptive analysis. Here, we will talk about the three key types of data analytics services most companies normally use:
Descriptive Analytics
Descriptive analytics is a process of analyzing your company’s historical and inflowing data to derive accurate reports and insights. Businesses often use this type of analytics to understand how their company is performing and to evaluate workforce performance.
The goal of descriptive analytics is to:
Discover the reasons behind the success or failure of specific projects, product launches, campaigns, and other business endeavors
Learn from past actions and understand how taking specific actions can influence future outcomes
The data gathered from tools like Google Analytics is a good example of descriptive analytics.
Predictive Analytics
Predictive analytics is the practice of analyzing historical data patterns and trends to predict future outcomes and optimize ongoing tasks according to the prediction. This kind of data analytics will help your company set realistic goals, manage stakeholder and customer expectations, and create effective plans. However, predictive analytics can never predict a future with 100% certainty. It predicts the probability of future outcomes and events.
For example, if you run an e-commerce business, you can use predictive analytics to:
Predict customer behavior
Anticipate inventory levels
Forecast what kind of products your customers are more likely to buy
Prescriptive Analytics
Prescriptive analytics is a practice of analyzing pre-existing data to find what actions the companies should take to achieve the best results (or a specific outcome). This type of data analytics model goes beyond simple predictive and descriptive analytics. It not only helps companies identify what’s likely to happen or has happened but also suggests what actions you should take to achieve your desired outcome.
Prescriptive analytics take multiple objectives, possible outcomes, and limitations into account to help you and the relevant stakeholders make informed decisions. Essentially, it answers your “What should I do next?” or similar questions.
How to Find the Right Data Analytics Consulting Services?
Here are a few considerations to find the right data analytics consulting service:
Understand Your Needs and Business Objectives
You should carefully consider your business objectives, future goals, and the challenges that you want to address using data analytics before approaching an agency. Do you want to increase your business’s operational efficiency? Do you want to optimize the existing marketing strategies, analyze market trends, and get better audience insights to maximize ROI? Maybe you want to find a way to improve customer experience. You must have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve before even thinking about finding data analytics consulting services.
Assess Their Expertise and Experience
Evaluating the expertise and experience of the data analytics consulting agencies is a crucial step. This will help you find agencies that have a steady track record of competing projects they were assigned to. To assess their expertise and experience, you need to focus on their industry experience. Have the data analytics consulting firms organizations that operate in the same industry as your company? How many projects did they work on and what was their project completion rate?
Agencies with industry-specific knowledge will understand your company’s unique problems better. As a result, they can provide relevant and effective solutions to solve your issues quickly. Check the portfolio and case studies published by the data analytics consultancy services to get a better understanding of their experience and areas of expertise.
Evaluate Their Technical Proficiency
Don’t forget to assess the technical proficiency of the data analytics firms before making a hiring decision. Do the data consultancies have solid AI, big data analytics, machine learning, and data science skills? Do they have the right tools? Do they have the necessary data mining, statistical analysis, data visualization, and data warehousing skills? Find answers to all these questions. After all, data analytics consulting services must have this advanced technical knowledge to provide the solutions your business needs.
Check References and Case Studies
It’s important to check the case studies, client references, and testimonials to understand and confirm the capabilities of the data analytics agencies. You can also check the agency's marketing materials, such as press releases, blog posts, and news to evaluate their reputation and expertise. This way, you can understand how the data firms solve their client’s problems and what sort of results they have gotten. If they have portfolios with many highly successful projects, it means you may also expect similar successful results.
Take Customization and Flexibility into Account
Every company has different data needs that require different solutions. That’s why you should find a data analytics consultancy that offers customized solutions according to your organization’s specific needs. The data consultancy services should also be flexible enough to adapt to different business objectives and data landscapes. Your company’s needs can change over time. So, the agency’s solutions must also adapt over time without hindering existing operations.
Assess the Data Analytics Firm’s Methodology and Approach
You must have a good understanding of the data management and problem-solving capabilities of the data analytics consulting services. After all, their methodologies and approaches can greatly influence the success rate of your projects. How do data analytics agencies solve complex enterprise problems? Do they have any proven ways to identify obstacles, risks, and other issues and to deal with them?
How are they going to handle your company’s data? What about their data privacy, security, and regulatory compliance practices? Do they have advanced tools and tech stack to provide effective data solutions? Don’t hold back and ask all these questions and a few more to understand the data firms’ methods that they employ to solve complex data problems.
Consider Communication and Collaboration
Transparent communication and effective collaboration are necessary to form a successful partnership. The data analytics consulting services must be open, easy to work with, and culturally fit with your business. Good data analytics consulting services will always be transparent about the project status. They will inform you about all the challenges they have faced during the implementation phase and provide regular updates on the milestones achieved.
You will always know what’s going on, helping you make informed decisions faster.
You must also check if the data firm of your choice is culturally aligned with your organization’s goals and values. A good cultural fit will lead to efficient communication, positive partnerships, and smoother workforce relations. In other words, the data analytics consulting services should appreciate your company’s values, leading to smoother and more efficient collaboration.
Assess the Consulting Cost and Engagement Model
Make sure that the data analytics firm of your choice provides you with detailed and transparent pricing for its consultancy services. Reliable data partners will give you a clear breakdown of the project cost. They will also explain how much time and resources each phase of the data analytics project will take. This way, you can evaluate the value of their services, assess if you can get a good ROI, and avoid hidden fees or unexpected expenses.
You should also ask the data analytics consulting services about their approach to project management and scoping. Assess their change management expertise. Try to find data analytics agencies who are transparent and willing to collaborate with your team to manage the scope of the project and address emerging obstacles. All of these will have a significant impact on the overall project cost and data analytics engagement timeline.
Conclusion
Finding the right data analytics consultancy services can help your company unleash its full potential. These consultancies will help you deal with data management complexities, discover new business opportunities, and provide insights to help your business grow.
If your company is embarking on the journey of digital transformation, our data experts at Render Analytics will make your path smoother. With our help, your business can:
Make informed decisions
Gain competitive advantage
Detect security loopholes and fraud faster
Reduce risk factors
Decrease cost
Optimize resource allocation
Make supply chain, business operations, and workforce more efficient
Automate repetitive tasks
Schedule a free consultation with Render Analytics today to find out how data analytics can help your organization.
FAQs
Why do you need the help of data analytics consultancy services?
The key reasons your company needs data analytics consultancy services are:
Making strategic decisions
Uncovering hidden trends
Discovering new market opportunities
Analyzing cluttered data and deriving actionable insights
Building solid data infrastructure
Solving internal challenges
Discovering possible risks and threats and preventing them from showing up
What do the data analytics consulting service providers do?
Fundamentally, the data analytics consultancy services analyze raw data, interpret them, and condense them into accurate, data-driven, actionable insights.
How much do data analytics services cost?
It depends on various factors. If the data analytics agency charges you on an hourly basis, it can cost $80-$300 per hour. The hourly charge can be even higher for a few specific industries. On the other hand, many data analytics service providers may also charge on a per-project basis. For example, the average cost of marketing automation is $35,000 per month in the US. However, if your company needs them to develop an independent analytical application, it may cost $4,00,000 or more. Ultimately, the cost depends on the scope of the data projects, your company’s size, the industry you’re operating in, and many other factors.