Big data is a collection of data made up of large data sets. You can use it to analyze patterns, associations, and trends. Big data can transform businesses as it lets you make better decisions, decrease your operating costs, and increase your revenue.
How do you define big data?
There are four characteristics you can use to define big data (the four V’s of big data).
- Volume: The scale of how much data you are collecting and whether that data is “big”.
- Variety: Big data can be structured or unstructured in format. It can be any form of content like – text, numerics, image, video, voice, and more.
- Velocity: The speed with which data is generated and used. Usually, big data is generated in real-time. For instance, we can look at twitter messages.
- Veracity: The quality of data that you are capturing. Ideally, you want to capture data that is valuable for your business to be able to analyze results accurately.
How can big data impact businesses?
In this day and age, different sources generate humongous amounts of data. Examples of diverse big data sources are text messages, log files, social media, voice messages, videos, and much more. The data can be either structured or unstructured. Collecting all this data and leveraging it to make better decisions can have a positive impact on your business.
Some of the ways that big data can impact businesses are:
1. By helping businesses become data-driven and draw insights to arrive at better decisions.
Since big data has such a large variety, you can uncover insights in a way that was not possible earlier. As an example, big data can allow e-commerce businesses to target customers in a better manner. It helps them visualize their customer behavior and needs.
You can spot trends that help you customize the end-user experience and help enhance decision making in your own business. You can further leverage DataOps to accelerate your business’s data lifecycle to achieve better results.
2. By enabling customer analytics powered by customer intelligence.
Before the advent of data, marketing was traditionally mass marketing. Big data allows you to understand what a customer does during their user journey. You get quantitative insights on customer behavior and can develop a better understanding of who your customer is. You also get a better knowledge of what they’re looking for during the user journey and when to serve them.
Examples are:
- Personalized recommendations generated from user data.
- Better product development as a result of knowledge of customer pain points.
- Personalized user journey due to better customer segmentation.
3. By helping improve product or service offerings.
You can obtain various insights from observing and analyzing the data trends your company generates. You can then use those insights to improve your business product or service offerings such as computer vision services.
If you have an e-commerce business, you can analyze social media posts by your customer about their likes or dislikes. You can then segment your customers by combining social media data with demographic data to help create better products for your customer base.
4. By helping enhance operational efficiency.
Big data can help you optimize your supply chain by using smart labels and sensors. John Deere used sensors in each of their tractors. Data collected from the sensors were used to predict whether the tractor would fail. You can use large amounts of data to analyze and build predictive models to streamline your processes and enhance business efficiency.
5. By increasing revenue and reducing cost.
Improving customer experience leads to increasing business revenue and reducing your costs. Using big data with advanced analytics, data science, and machine learning can help you build solutions to improve customer acquisition, enhance customer retention, and achieve higher growth. You can also provide a better customer experience and get new revenue streams.
In summary.
Big Data is not just a trend. It is the future. Exponential growth in data generation by devices connected to the internet has resulted in a massive increase in data.
The way your business collects data, manages it, and processes this data can help you gain an edge over your competitors. Insight generation and predictive modeling using big data can increase your chances of success today and in the future. Properly using business data can help you increase your revenue, improve customer experience, and reduce costs.
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