Building big data capabilities

Big data can be leveraged to generate alerts around customer behavior

With the series of advancement in the technological landscape of our country, such as penetration of Internet, budding acceptance towards IoT (Internet of Things) devices, smartphones and broadband, Nasscom recently estimated that the valuation of data will witness an eight-fold increase, from $2 billion to $16 billion, by 2025.

Managing and analysing massive volumes of data has become essential to a business’ growth and leadership in the market. However, the demand of data management has triggered the need for new skill sets across technical, operational and managerial levels. Companies are seen investing aggressively in building such skill sets and competencies within.

When businesses began to expand, their prime focus remained around clustering customers as per the markets they’re foraying into. While this segmentation them to offer customised services, it lacked personalisation in the interaction that a customer experiences in the neighbourhood stores.

Today, companies are directing focus on understanding customer expectations and actions, which has become critical to drive maximum value to their business.

An illustration of how big data usage can help businesses grow can be well understood with a clear dichotomy we see between the telecom and e-commerce sector in India. Despite its massive data bank, the former has been unable to make a significant difference to its consumers. On the other hand, e-commerce firms have managed to capitalise on big data in a relatively shorter period. Companies like Amazon churn large volumes of customer data, allowing them to increase market performance efficiency, widen customer base and strengthen brand loyalty. Meanwhile, telcos have been using their database strictly for internal purposes.

The usage of big data has been limited to predictive churn analysis and retention, product recommendations and knowledge base enrichment for “query” management. With the competitive landscape becoming increasingly fierce, companies recognise the value every customer brings to its business. From being seen as a reactive tool, big data is now widely used to generate proactive recommendations and alerts around customer behaviour at an individualised level. For organisations to capitalise on big data, the following layers need to be set:

Aligning leaders’ vision in an organisation around the potential of “big data” and defining a road map on “what and how” big data can enhance its interface with customers. Also to ensure appropriate resources are allocated to infrastructure/manpower for big data capabilities.

Getting a common data dictionary for the organisation to better correlate data collected at various points. Not having the same leads to a loss of data insights.

Setting up technical architecture to process and analyse the high volume and variety of data.

Embracing the need to add data scientists and experts and smartly investing in reskilling employees to ensure various business functions integrate big data into their work.

In India, the execution of big data analysis is still at a nascent stage. In order to bridge the gap between data and action, we need to follow a two-pronged approach — partner with specialised players providing big data and analytics support, and build internal competencies around its applications. The customer demands are evolving at a fast pace and it is only with big data that we can keep ourselves relevant to customers.