Enabling a unified digital experience intelligence solution to improve your offering
Have you ever struggled with vast amounts of data, with teams unable to access it all, and losing clients because they do not act fast enough? You’re not alone—many organizations face this challenge daily, which is one reason platforms can fail.
In today’s fast-evolving video platforms industry, businesses are inundated with data generated by audiences, content performance, marketing campaigns, user interactions, and others. Yet, despite this abundance, many video services struggle to gain visibility into the full customer experience. Each department operates in silos1, so decision-making sometimes becomes misaligned with the rest of the organization and its strategy. The outcome is potential missed opportunities and a subpar user experience with long-term ramifications for revenue as it becomes challenging to derive actionable insights.
What you need to break down silos and build a bridge over these gaps is a unified digital experience intelligence2 solution that integrates all your data into a centralized system that everyone can have access to. This creates an individual view that empowers departments to collaborate and make data-informed decisions needed to stay competitive in a data-driven world without the need for long processes, huge investments, or large data teams.
Let’s take a look at the importance of unifying the understanding of video platforms across departments in a holistic single view, how insights can become actionable, and how breaking down silos can enable your teams to act with a shared understanding of the user experience to improve your offering and drive business growth.
Why do silos hurt video platforms?
To understand the impact that data silos have on video platforms we need to take a look into the present realities of the industry.
The current digital experience in video platforms has grown significantly due to innovation, resulting in vast volumes of data from various digital touchpoints that customers interact with. For example, customers now use various devices to consume their preferred content, generating user journey engagement data. They are targeted with digital ads and marketing campaigns from across various channels, generating data on attribution and activation. Additionally, the content catalog is enriched with metadata including title, genre, running time, cast, and director, among others. It provides data on content performance and informs teams on customer preference, which in turn can be used in the business’ content acquisition or licensing strategy.
However, the more data you have, the more time and effort you need to put into transforming it into actionable insights. Many assume they just need more data to make smarter decisions. But in reality, more data isn’t the issue, it’s the lack of a single, shared understanding across departments leading to misalignment and inefficiency. Teams are unaware of what one team knows as these massive volumes of data are organized in silos. It brings up the need for reports to be created and shared, posing a problem in and of itself, as data from other departments is delayed by two or more days for 78% of professionals involved in business analysis. In a fast-paced environment as is the industry, that is not good enough. It takes the competitive edge off.
Waiting time for data. Adapted from Oracle Blog. Source: Dimensional Research, 2022.
Another issue is that due to data being on different systems, and worked by different people, the way it is processed can also diverge. As a natural result, metrics and definitions on the same data vary, thus becoming a real challenge that professionals face, as over 90% of these professionals naturally find it difficult to get accurate data from other teams. If a two-day delay causes teams to act on outdated insights, for example acting late on high-risk churn users, imagine the cumulative revenue lost due to inefficiencies over a year.
How can analytics be unified with a holistic approach?
You now know two truths: data on its own is not enough to produce relevant insights without context, and more data does not always equal successful business outcomes. To do so, what you need is to find a self-service analytics3 solution that takes the missing puzzle pieces to complete the picture. By doing so, you can make data-driven decisions that have an impact on business goals, such as being 23 times more likely to acquire customers, and 6.5 times more likely to retain them, according to McKinsey.
What if your teams had real-time access to the same insights, eliminating guesswork and misalignment? A unified analytics approach doesn’t just centralize data—it transforms decision-making, ensuring every action is informed, timely, and aligned with business goals.
NPAW Product Analytics Overview Dashboard.
As it is very common in the video platform industry that the customer journey starts and ends in the digital realm, this solution integrates multiple data sources from different departments to give a holistic view of your service to all relevant stakeholders.
From user preferences, viewing habits, and content performance, to data from marketing campaigns, advertising, or the user journey. And, just like Netflix does, by collecting and analyzing on a single platform, you can make data-driven decisions to personalize your user’s experience, give tailored recommendations, or even on content acquisition, among others.
What are the benefits of a unified digital experience intelligence solution?
A unified digital experience intelligence solution gives visibility to all stakeholders, eliminating your blind spots. In a business where you are competing for your user’s attention with a product that usually needs no interaction after pressing play, the data-to-action process needs to be immediate to avoid user churn.
Unified analytics isn’t just about aggregating data, it’s about driving real business results. A unified solution will enable your teams to act on a shared understanding with fewer resources and in less time, aligning their work to your business goals and translating data into impactful actions. With a solution such as NPAW Product Analytics, you can:
-
- Boost Productivity: Centralized data reduces time spent searching for insights, allowing teams to focus on value-added actions and lowering the steep learning curve.
- Drive Key Results: Correlate insights across departments to provide teams with a 360 understanding of the user, reducing risks by enabling complete data-driven decision-making.
- Enhance User Experience: Use each data source as an extra layer of understanding of your user and product to create a personalized experience for them that will keep them engaged and retain them.
This holistic approach also benefits leaders, executives, and C-levels within the company. It provides a top-level view across your whole business and a contextualized customer digital experience to help make informed decisions aligned with business objectives and ensure every action contributes to those overarching goals.
What role does data literacy play in your success?
Every innovation or digital transformation within a business always comes with its challenges, and a unified analytics solution is not any different. While on one side we know how this self-service solution can empower professionals to access the data themselves without the need of others, on the other a need arises for employees to be sufficiently data literate4 to understand what they are being shown on their platform. This does not mean that employees must be experts in data analytics, but they do need to have a certain level of understanding of the insights they are shown to act on them.
As it is common that sometimes new solutions are met with resistance, it is important to involve employees in training and workshops on how to access and use the insights in their day-to-day work to achieve their individual and team goals. This is to avoid implementing solutions without strong internal practices that equip employees with the necessary skills to leverage the analytics solution. Only then, they will be able to answer their questions with confidence.
What does working with a shared understanding look like?
To help determine the concerns that you may have, let’s identify some common use cases where a unified digital experience intelligence solution can be leveraged to achieve your business goals. The example that we will use is the impact of acquiring a new movie and executing a marketing campaign across departments.
For the Content team, the acquisition of a new movie to the content catalog brings data on content performance and engagement, such as active users, plays, and completion rate, among others. With data from the audience, they can discover patterns in audience behavior to adapt their content strategy.
For Marketing teams, understanding what segments of your audience are watching the movie, and in what regions, can help them adapt their marketing strategy accordingly, expanding on campaigns where they are being heard the most, and also personalizing the campaigns in line with audience preferences.
Product and UX teams for instance can utilize the same data to understand how the audience discovered the movie. Using this they can enhance the user experience by finetuning the recommendations so the user experience is personalized to the segmented audience, or by improving the features that lead to the discovery.
By leveraging the same piece of information correlated from multiple sources, teams can take advantage of these insights to achieve both common and individual goals that will drive subscriptions and keep the audience engaged.
Leverage NPAW Product Analytics for all aspects of your video business
The journey towards a unified solution doesn’t have to be complicated. Knowing it is key to gaining a competitive advantage is the starting point to achieve data-driven excellence. Netflix-level personalization and performance are no longer an ideal but a reality that you can achieve with fewer resources, less investment, and much faster.
NPAW Product Analytics will equip your business with tools to centralize and contextualize data, driving actionable insights across all departments. From content acquisition and audience engagement to marketing and UX optimization, our solution integrates disparate data into a single, holistic view to enable teams to make informed decisions and align their actions with overarching business goals.
In an industry as dynamic as video platforms, the ability to adapt and innovate hinges on your capacity to understand your data together. If you want to unlock the full potential of your video business, you can request a demo for Product Analytics. You can also follow us on LinkedIn if you want to keep up with content such as this.
Glossary
1 According to Tech Target, a data silo is a collection of data controlled by a department or business unit that is isolated partly or completely from other groups within the same organization, which becomes an obstacle when a company wants to be data-driven.
2 According to IBM, digital experience refers to “an interaction between a user and an organization that is made possible because of digital technologies.”
3 According to Gartner, self-service analytics is “often characterized by simple-to-use BI tools with basic analytic capabilities and an underlying data model that has been simplified or scaled down for ease of understanding and straightforward data access.”
4 According to Tableau, data literacy is “the ability to explore, understand, and communicate with data in a meaningful way. This can be on different levels: technically and advanced, or on a much more basic level.”