Big data shouldn’t mean big reports. On the contrary, big data should reveal key insights that are easily digestible for your team. It should enable you to take action that you’re confident can drive results for your enterprise.
These insights don’t need to be big breakthroughs—it’s the little insights that can affect small groups of customers and even individuals. But how you do you go about finding these key insights? What is it about conventional data analysis that can prevent you from accomplishing this?
Averages aren’t always best
When it comes to data analysis, our tendency is to try and understand the “average” customer or client. We believe that any insights gathered from these clients can affect the most change throughout the entire customer base. After all, if we satisfy the average customer with what they want, shouldn’t other customers feel the same way?
However, this thinking leaves out something crucial: outliers. Data is useless without meaning and outliers can add context to otherwise bland data.
Let’s consider the following example. The leadership team at an e-commerce clothing store wants to improve its revenue. Their previous data analyses revealed that their “average customer” is male, between the ages of 25 and 35, and typically purchases a single button down shirt.
However, their newest data expert points out something else in the data—the few users who’ve bought three or more shirts at once. These customers generate more revenue per cart, so the company’s marketing team decides to investigate. It turns out these outlier customers were women buying clothes for their boyfriends or husbands. Now the company knows there’s a separate customer segment they can market to.
You should never underestimate the insights drawn from outliers. What’s more, the very fact that they’re outliers makes them easier to find in the data set itself. Apply the outlier concept to any volume based transaction processing environment (read: most large distributed businesses), and you will always find applicability of long-tail analyses through the business value chain.
It’s the small details that drive personalization
Big data, by its very nature, contains many data points about individual customers and clients. These can be harnessed to deliver truly personalized experiences that can help build loyalty to your company.
Let’s consider consumer-facing apps like Pandora and Spotify. Far from being just music streaming sites, both take their users’ music preferences to recommend new artists and create customized playlists.
Would a jazz lover care about the latest Taylor Swift single topping the charts? Probably not, despite the single’s popularity, and their music playing history would confirm this. It’s the personalized experience that brings people back to Spotify and Pandora, not what everyone else is listening to. Big data makes this possible.
Big data can deliver the right information at the right time
Applications like Google Maps and Waze use their troves of mapping and traffic information to help users get to their destinations on time. Shazam tells us the name of the song we’re currently listening to without fail. And Google Translate can translate the words you’re saying in near-real time.
All of these apps have one thing in common—they rely on big data to deliver immediate, personalized results for every user. Of course, having the data is only part of the solution. Enterprises must make this information easily accessible and usable. This doesn’t just apply to customers. Internally, all employees should be able to use data to answer relevant questions. This could include, for example, well-planned dashboards for investigating relevant data.
Antuit can help you bridge the gap from big data to new insights
Powerful insights don’t have to come from understanding the average customer or the most popular feature. If anything, it’s the small insights that can take your strategy into new, yet lucrative, directions.
If you’re unsure of your current data analysis capabilities or are looking to get started, contact us. Our team of data experts has worked with enterprises across various industries to develop modern and scalable data platforms.
It’s this approach that gives our clients the ability to scale their analytics and reporting capabilities without sacrificing the ability to uncover the small insights that matter.
With the right approach, big data can reveal key insights for your enterprise. Let us show you how.
