Guest post by Graham Brierton for Big Data Republic
Something we don’t talk about when we talk Big Data is the environment it works in. That bothers me because Big Data means nothing without a context. That means we have to look at it in terms of what it means for real customers and organisations, in real sectors – like retail, finance, utilities. What does it mean for customer service, for example?……
What does data mean to a retailer?
Let’s consider an example. Let’s say you are a retailer: What does big data mean to you? How could it make a meaningful contribution to the business? Let’s put you in charge of the customer service organization, where you quickly find there’s an awful lot of data we need to work with in order to get big data powered customer service.
What data in particular? The different types of data sources you would typically be looking at will include transaction data, your customers’ online data, email/social media, and all the other unstructured data floating around in your business. (You need to get into this unstructured data to figure out what’s going on underneath your metrics; analysis of it will give you some insights into what you can do to address any problems.)
Why bother doing all this data work?
Why do you want to work with all this data? The “payoff” is the ability to address customer issues either before the customer calls the call center, or you can respond to them so that the customers get serviced in whatever mode or media they prefer.
For example: When you watch the trail of a customer complaint about late delivery on social media, could effective use of data approaches have helped you pre-empt this situation? Can we understand which customers are the most likely to respond to a problem by going to social media? All these connected scenarios use elements of big data; just think of it as big data in the user context (small data?).
That’s the context that the business wants to see — the reason to do big data: that’s the kind of use case you need to be generating and making real. Otherwise, big data is just going to remain a PowerPoint fantasy. And no one wants that to be its epitaph.
Published on Big Data Republic
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