“Data helps you gain knowledge, but the information helps you make better decisions”
Information is basically the processed data that is well structured and presented in a context that can turn out to be useful. Well if we talk about the business world, this difference between the data and information plays a huge role.
Business strategies are information-driven, as most of the decisions and business plans are made after great research on its data. Here comes the role of Big Data technology, which is specially designed to focus on processing and analyzing the huge amount of data.
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So what does Big Data technology do?
Big data analytics is a complex process where a huge amount of data is examined to acquire some fruitful and simplified information. Here the algorithms are run on varied datasets where structured and unstructured data is stored. These processes help to reveal some unseen patterns by finding correlations between data and thus are of great use for market analysis and changing customer needs in business.
Leveraging this technology, businesses can improve their decision-making process with the reduced time in data analysis and by extracting some credible information to act as a base for reformed business strategies.
In-order to cope up with the changing market trends, having precise information on what has changed and how at the right time becomes important for the business. Big Data technology has the ability to work faster on the datasets which helps the businesses to get a competitive advantage to make the right move on time.
List of big brands that use Big Data for different business aspects
- Coca-Cola, famous for the personalized branding of its product, uses the information collected from Big data analytics to prepare its customer retention strategy and in return gains thousands of new customers with its revised approach.
The brand collects data from its users in the form of feedback through phone, messages, emails, and social networks and also analyzes their purchase behavior to use this customer input to process and revise their business strategies.
- Fortune 500 fashion retailers use big data analytics to optimize their spending on brand recognition and reallocate spend on identifying the areas where they can use this money for improving customer experience.
Here the deep insights are being made on the ROI of the spend invested for promoting the brand from the response rate of the marketing campaigns and precise data is prepared for how much from it can be diverted to use it for improving customer experience.
There are many more use-cases of Big data that can be added to the list but moving forward let’s get straight to the point on how businesses can leverage big data technology for business post-COVID-19.
Benefits of Big data analytics for business planning post-COVID-19
● Drives innovation and surge product development
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a new normal by making people adjust to the changing working and living scenarios. The changed needs of the customers surge for the innovations or development of something that can help people to navigate the change easily.
Businesses should take this crisis as an opportunity to divert their efforts to learn about the pain-points of their customer to give them an all-new product or service based on the new problems that aroused during the time of the pandemic.
Here the Big data analysis can help them collect information about their customer’s problems by various means for the business to study the insights and figure out a solution that can develop a new product for the business.
● Learn the changed customer behavior
The time before COVID-19 and after brings a huge change in the terms of new customer habits and changed perspective. Your old business strategy or product might not interest them with the same effectiveness as they used to before the pandemic arrived.
Big data analytics can help businesses to track the changed interest and learn about the new habits of the customer to revise the business plans accordingly. It can help businesses to redevelop their product by gathering data and applying different analysis models that drive out some conclusions to design new product lines.
Data is gathered through various channels which are then collected to study the customer needs. These channels collect data by tracking their customer behavior, product purchases, and competitor analysis. The conclusions are driven from this process then are evaluated by applying logical reasoning to come up with the profitable revised strategies.
● Recognition of the loyal customer
It’s time you appreciate the ones who didn’t leave your side even in times of crisis. Having an intuitive knowledge about your loyal customers helps you know the real audience of your business to refine the people who you think would love your product.
Utilizing the customer data using Big data to compare the pre and post-pandemic reports will help you discover some common patterns and customer behavior with their certain actions to help the business owners acknowledge the things that work for their business and note the areas that worked well for them to retain their customer base.
Looking at the numbers and the result of the analysis, a customized discount package can be created for such customers for their loyalty, and as a thank you message can be sent to them as a gesture of gratitude and a customer retention strategy.
● Helps revise marketing strategy for business
With the increasing trend of digitization, businesses around the world are investing a lot of money in branding and promoting their business. A businessman needs to keep track of the amount he spends on the marketing and the kind of the outcomes that he gets in the revert to plan his future investments.
Leveraging big data’s mass analytics process, a study could be conducted on the successful and failed campaigns during the COVID-19 phase, to understand the point of sale that worked and the cost involved in the conversion. By monitoring the online activities of the customers when they arrive to purchase a product and noting their behavior while they interact with your website gives you a lot of data to analyze and know their interest to show the customer the product of their interest.
● Guides to create a better risk management solution
The best thing about a crisis is that it teaches things that a businessman would not learn otherwise. Taking a lesson from the COVID-19 crisis, businesses can use the learnings for creating risk management strategies in order to make the business ready for any future crisis.
Big data analytics have a huge role to play here, as by implementing integrated data processing algorithms and considering various factors of business to help predict the risk factors that could arrive in business to be included in the risk management solutions.
Analyzing the data collected from the uncertain situation that arrived in COVID-19, businesses could enhance the quality of their management models and mitigate the effect of danger.
Summing up
Data plays an important role in a business to operate smoothly. The advancement in technology has made the availability of data easier as the sources that collect this data have been improved.
As the businesses have lots of data collected, it’s up to them how well they leverage the technology like Big data to make that information useful for their business and gain advantages like reduced cost of operations.
Author Bio :
Parth Patel is a serial entrepreneur and CEO of SyS Creations – a leading managed IT services firm focused on technology-driven healthcare solutions with a customer-centric, journey-first approach. Operating the IT Infrastructure of Healthcare SMEs and startups keeps him on his toes and his passion for helping others keeps him motivated.
