Data is a key commodity for any retail business owner looking to succeed in today’s digitized economy. But just getting a hold of the data isn’t enough – you have to know how to make the most of it, and turn raw data into refined reporting. Think of it as the difference between mining raw gemstones and selling refined gems; the higher value is in the finished product.
As an example, consider the data generated by your consumer finance program. Hopefully, you have a lot of it, as that’s a sign that your consumer finance program is moving some revenue for you. Data is nearly as precious as revenue – and is, indeed, the primary source of revenue for some business models – in today’s economy, so the more data your consumer finance program is pulling in, the better.
But with unrefined and constantly mined data piling up, how can you make the most of it? How can you refine that raw information and turn it into precious gems for your consumer finance program and your business as a whole? It all starts with the right solution.
Data analysts know that presenting conclusions in a way that a non-data analyst audience will understand and appreciate them is often an enormous challenge. The value of data is in the actionable conclusions you draw from it, and pulling out the critical nuggets from large data sets that will inform those sorts of conclusions is difficult even for data pros, much less retail business owners who already have a million other things on their plates.
In other words, to effectively leverage the data, you must present the data in an easily-digestible form. If you are a retail business owner, that means you are, in essence, probably both the data analyst and the data audience. Put simply, you are collecting and formatting data to present to yourself for the improvement of your own business. And guess what? If you don’t have a solution for doing that efficiently, you are going to be doing everything yourself, manually. Even if you have a team member to do it for you, they are going to be spending a lot of time doing that instead of serving your customers or working on any of the other dozens of tasks that need doing in any given day at a retail business.
How can you gather, format, and present data about your consumer financing program in a way that empowers you to make meaningful improvements without sucking up all your time or that of your team? There’s really only one truly effective solution.
Good data, as hinted at above, is data you can use right away. It is data that speaks to the topics you want to know about right away, and gives you the wherewithal to make smart changes quickly based on that data.
FormPiper is, among other things, the perfect consumer finance data presenter. It brings the data you need to know about your consumer finance program to the forefront in one single, convenient dashboard. With single and multi-location reporting available, plus managed and self-managed service options, FormPiper makes it incredibly easy to get the good data you need to make decisions on everything from lenders to which team members might need a little additional training to help them close financed deals.
Ultimately, what FormPiper really does is save you a lot of time that would otherwise be spent collecting the critical data about the key metrics of your consumer finance program and putting that data in an accessible, presentable form. And, since time is money, it’s just one more way that FormPiper puts more revenue in your pocket.