If you are a brand or a company wondering what big data analytics is and how you can harness its power for growth then, this is the right place. With the new wave of business intelligence influenced by machine learning and artificial intelligence, businesses are looking towards big data analytics companies to help them grapple with the ever changing needs of the market.
Whether it is understanding your target market or streamlining your business processes for better growth, every sector of business has big data at some point. But before we understand the changing trends of this collaboration, let’s take a look at what big data analytics means.
What is big data analytics?
Big data analytics is the process of examining big data in order to process, clean and analyze the correlation between different elements. This is done by using conventional business intelligence and machine learning.
There are many sources companies use to receive data. This includes social media, smart connected devices, research information, and public records.
Data analytics companies then run this data through the process of collecting, analyzing, processing, and providing data visualization. As a new technology, big data analytics companies are there to guide businesses towards data driven and accurate decision making. Let’s see how detailed the role of data analytics companies is and how they go about using traditional business intelligence to perform big data analytics.
The role of data analytics companies
The role of data analytics companies is widespread and can be daunting to understand. The bottom line is, these consulting firms offer their expertise and services to help companies make better decisions or improve their performance. This can include, streamlining their logistics workflow, employee management CRM and ERP functionality or understanding their target market. The wider aspects and use cases of why businesses are adopting big data are below.
For now, let’s have a look at the detailed process of how big data is actually handled.
- First of all, consulting firms help companies identify the problem or usually the businesses coming for consultation already have an idea of what they want.
- Then raw data collection is started. Usually businesses are performing low because of unconsolidated data flow and lack of unified platforms for data collection. Data scientists help these companies gain a more holistic view.
- Thirdly, data processing is done with the help of data mining, and other tools of data analytics approach. The data is stored in data warehouses or lakes in an assembled and structured form.
- Data quality software is also used to cleanse the raw data so that actionable insights can be extracted.
- Data analysis and its actual process is done with different approaches and tools at the disposal of data scientists. This includes: predictive or Prescriptive data analysis, text mining, artificial intelligence or machine learning.
- Lastly, data visualization is done to provide a clear view of actionable insights into the company’s performance and inner workings.
The importance of big data analytics:
By 2023, the big data market is going to accelerate in growth up to $103 billion. Across Google and WhatsApp, billions of users search for content and exchange information. This alone shows how unique information is coming into the digital space, all there for companies to exploit.
This is why companies need to manage and assume their unstructured data into structured form. Big data analytics and consulting firms offer businesses a better insight on what’s happening in the world around them.
Other trends show that streaming services are especially using predictive analytics to gauge customer mood and influence their choices with personalized suggestions. Statistics from studies also show that the banking sector is the one where the most amount of data is produced every second. This highlights the need and importance of big data analytics today.
Advantages of using big data analytics:
Following is the detailed account of ways in which big data analytics is proving useful and in fact, essential for businesses.
Better market insight:
Understanding your market is the first step towards successfully marketing your product or service. This is the basis on which companies run their marketing campaigns. However, collecting data from different sources can be tedious. This process, along with the painstakingly complex process of understanding the data is now simplified via big data analytics experts.
For better market intelligence, social media is the goldmine of information. People are openly sharing their preferences, choices and depicting their lifestyle via their media accounts. The huge amount of personalized information is essential for understanding customer’s shopping behaviors and daily choices they make. Moreover, marketing strategies are also dictated by the competitors’ analysis to understand where the market is headed.
Improved customer relationships
When you know your market and what your target audience likes, it becomes easier to improve your customer retention and build a strong customer base. But how do companies manage their customer relationships to ensure satisfaction?
This is done by extracting data from sources like traditional data sets I.e. customer data from your website and customer interactions, conducting market research, social media and cookies. After this is done, companies then gain better insight into customer behavior. This might also highlight areas of improvement to engage with your customer better. Managing abandoned carts, using chatbots for customer service and tweaking campaigns for a personalized experience are all ways in which companies use big data.
Run successful targeted campaigns
Since the advent of big data, companies have used it to run more personalized and ROI driven marketing campaigns. With better customer insight and marketing intelligence, providing people with a personalized experience specific to their needs is easy.
Monitoring point of sales and online purchases allows marketing teams to deliver better customer experience. Previously relying on A/B testing, now companies use big data to make decisions in real time. As a result, gaining customer loyalty becomes easier for the brands.
Streamlined business operations:
Business activities can be improved with the help of big data analytics. Your business processes reflect directly on your growth, progress, and customer satisfaction. This is why companies are using big data analytics to identify the problem in their disconnected workflows, maintenance, risk analysis and cyber security.
For businesses, the process of working with big data analytics companies is nothing short of rewarding. From better HR management, improving sales cycle, employee and work scheduling, to supply chain and logistics management, companies are enhancing their business performance.
Another reason why companies are using big data is to protect themselves from potential risks by running predictive analysis. This helps them gauge and improve risk management. When it comes to security, big data is also used for dealing with cyber security threats. When all of your data is online on cloud databases, it is likely that you will run into some security risks or fraud. But thanks to big data analytics companies, these issues are dealt with in real time.
Protection of your data
Speaking of cyber security, let’s go into detail on how businesses improve their data security with big data. Data encryption is the most common way of protecting your data. From customer information to in-house databases, all are protected by better synthesizing information with machine learning and artificial intelligence tools.
Moreover, there are AI tools which can predict attacks and help companies prepare for the risks accordingly. Data breaches are dealt swiftly as well, with quick data processing which does not leave room or time for potential breaches.
Agile supply chain management
For businesses who are dealing with supply chain management, big data analytics are used to predict upcoming risks that might disrupt the supply chain process. An example of how companies are using big data is using weather forecasts to manage delivery schedules.
Moreover, retailers can use information from customer shopping behaviors to manage their inventory and stock accordingly. Now, not only huge conglomerates with global supply chains but small businesses are also using big data analytics to make better business decisions. Meeting the changing customer demands is now easier as businesses can gauge what their customers are liking through research. Then this research is used to make procurement plans. This also reduces the gap between manufacturers and retailers to avoid disruption in stock and delivery management.
Big data is also used to manage quality control and maintaining temperature in their warehouses. This is done with the help of researching and logging the fluctuating temperatures of cold chain management machines. This is then used to tweak the temperatures of the logistics and helps in making the delivery smoothly.
Better chances of mitigating risks
Especially in financial risks, big data helps in identifying areas where businesses might suffer. This also includes cyber security but also goes beyond that. The process of using big data to mitigate risks includes fraud prevention and money laundering as well. With the help of predictive analysis, companies now receive forecasts on how to prevent unlawful activities. Preventive measures to avoid fraudulent activities include using firewall, encryption and protection via authorizations.