Three Reasons Why You Should Invest in Operations
It’s annual planning season for a lot of companies and that means an opportunity to make decisions about where you invest for the future. There are countless strategies to grow a business, but often times, Operational functions can take a backseat to other teams like Marketing or Product. If you’re looking to understand customer needs and data is a key piece of your operational strategy, here are three reasons why investing in Operations is the right move to grow your business.
Understand Customer Pain Points
Finding the balance between new features and improving your current product is critical to keeping your customers coming back. You can have the most innovative, cutting edge feature set, but if customers continually run into issues that prevent them from getting maximum value from your current product, this handicap will hold you back.
Operations teams are often the closest to day to day customers and the challenges they face through support interactions. Understanding and leveraging this data can be a powerful driver for improvement and business growth. But for an Operations team to be able to share insight, they must have the right investment in data and tools to glean insights. Consider investing in your operations teams to develop a comprehensive data strategy and leverage the investment to categorize, prioritize and surface key insights that can be the key to unlocking more customer spend.
Source Ideas from Customers
In addition to customer support challenges, your operations team is an untapped resource for ideas from customer feedback. Confusion with a specific feature or feedback during a support interaction can be leveraged as a source of new ideas on how your product can evolve. Similar to customer challenges, the key to tapping into this signal is an operations team that has the right strategy, data infrastructure and resources to quickly surface ideas in a digestible way.
Protect Your Business
Your operations team is on the front-line of the business day to day, addressing issues, hearing feedback, and often times observing risks that could be blind spots for your business. Left unchecked, risks can turn into full crises that have long-term impact to your revenue stream and company reputation. A properly funded operations team can be leveraged to not only handle reactive work but also pivot to proactive risk mitigation by identifying threats and developing contingency plans or partnering with product to lessen risk through feature development.
Smart investments in operations can have immediate short-term as well as long-term benefits. But what if you are concerned about over investing in this area? The beauty of a measurable operations function is that you can always do a cost/benefit analysis using metrics to ensure you are getting the most value from your investment. Investment in operations will pay dividends to your business through more data-driven insights and resources to support customers in increasing their spend.
