Humans have produced 18 zettabytes of data till now(1 zettabyte=1 billion terabytes). The figure is going to rise further with the onset of IoT devices. According to a report by IDC, the number of IoT devices is going to reach 41.6 billion by 2025. Businesses today are leveraging the benefit of Big data to their advantage by either analyzing the data sets themselves or by opting for an efficient service provider from the list of Big Data Analytics companies for hire.
In this article, we shall get to know some basics about Big Data and also see how, through ‘SALES’, you can get the most out of Big Data. Let the games begin!
Before delving into how Big Data can help you in your business let us understand the five V’s of Big Data that forms the base for the technology;
Velocity: Data is being generated at phenomenal speeds today. Velocity defines the speed of data generation.
Volume: Volume refers to the tremendous amounts of data that is produced by various devices like smartphones, IoT devices, credit cards, and others.
Value: Value refers to the tangible benefits which we expect to gain by acquiring and analyzing the data.
Variety: Variety refers to the wide range of data sets available today. Previously, structured data formed the majority, but now most of the data that comes for analysis is unstructured.
Veracity: Veracity is concerned with the accuracy of the data. Is the data accurate? Because if it isn’t, then the inferences gained through this data would do more harm than good.
Now let’s look at how SALES can help you in improving your profits
The acronym SALES in this article stands for:
Scalability
Artificial Intelligence
Location Analytics
Exploratory Analytics
Sentiment Analytics
Scalability
There are times when every organization experiences growth pangs. How do I take my organization to the next level? This question plagues the mind of every business owner.
Big Data Analytics can prove to be the answer to this impending question. The data that your business collects from various sources can prove to be the key to solving your problems.
Using modern data analytics solutions, you can improve the productivity of your business. Expert data analysts and data scientists can vet through tons of data that your business generates in a normal course of the operation and find out information that can help you in improving the efficiency of your business processes.
For example, by analyzing your logistics and shipping data, you can find out the best routes to send your material. This will help you in minimizing the fuel costs and save money.
By analyzing large data sets of your business, you can bring improvement in any business process, be it Manufacturing, Sales, Inventory management, Purchase, or Human Resource & Training. Analyzing large data sets will help your business in achieving scalability by improving the efficiency of your business.
Artificial Intelligence
Earlier as the influx of data was limited, there was no need for sophisticated technologies like artificial intelligence. But the scenario has changed now, data is too big for humans to evaluate now, and we need a better system to sift through tons of data produced every day.
With machine learning capabilities imbibed into it, AI is now more powerful than ever. We input data gained from various data points like customer’s personal preferences, social media chatter, reviews of products given online, efficiency of production machines, and employee satisfaction ratings into an AI system.
The AI system then recognizes patterns from the data and gives you actionable business intelligence, which accelerates the sales.
Using AI, you can conduct a microscopic analysis that will give you previously hidden insights. For instance, if you have an e-commerce website, then AI will tell you not only what the customer buys from your website, but also things, like
- When does the customer buy?
- How much time does the customer spend on a specific part of your website?
- What the customer interested to buy in the future?
- What is the customer not buying from your store and why?
This will eventually help you in improving your website and matching it with customer’s preferences.
Location Analytics
Using location analytics, you can identify the hotspots that are having a visible effect on your business. For example, heat mapping of the real estate market can predict the potential real-estate hotspots of the future accurately.
Location analytics also helps retailers in up-selling and cross-selling. For example:- people going to the gym would be more interested in buying organic food than those who don’t.
An enterprise-level logistics business can identify the best location to set up a warehouse, saving millions of dollars in the process.
Location analytics can help businesses in unearthing valuable information regarding how location helps or damages their business.
Even online behemoths like Amazon are using location analytics to their advantage. Amazon has started opening physical book stores by using the power of location-based analytics. Amazon could identify the best-selling books in a particular area and hence arrange for stocking more quantities of such books. This has helped in boosting the revenue of Amazon.
Exploratory Analytics
Exploratory data analysis helps you in making sense of your data. In exploratory data analysis, you frame the queries that you want to run with the accumulated data.
The exploratory analysis helps you in improving the integrity of the data by spotting the mistakes in your data sets. It also helps you in recognizing the most critical variables in your data.
Conducting an exploratory analysis is often the first step in the process of Big Data analytics, as it helps you in gaining confidence in the quality of your data. Inaccurate data leads to inaccurate interferences, which can prove to be dangerous as they can guide you on the wrong path.
Another benefit of conducting a thorough exploratory data analytics is that it tests whether the questions that you are asking from your data are correct or not. Many times it happens that on conducting exploratory data analysis, data scientists and analysts find out new surprising insights that thrash pre-assumptions.
Hence you should do a robust exploratory analysis before you go ahead with deducing interferences from your data.
Sentiment Analytics
For any business, it is of utmost importance to know what its customers are thinking about it. This can prove to be a question of survival for a business. As if the sentiment is negative in a majority of customers, then it can prove to be a body blow for the company.
Big Data analytics can help you in identifying customer sentiment. This is known as sentiment analytics.
Sentiment analytics tools tell you by analyzing all the chatter about your brand on the internet, whether your brand is being perceived in a positive, negative, or neutral manner by people.
Conducting a sentiment analysis will help you in gaining insights about why the customers are happy or angry with your brand. This will eventually help you in designing solutions to improve your brand image.
This will also help you in avoiding knee-jerk reactions. For example:- if a small group of customers are complaining about your brand but the larger population is relatively happy, then there is no need to change anything in your business.
Sentiment analysis also helps you in testing the efficacy of your marketing campaigns. Whether your latest advertisement is a success or a failure, you will know it through sentiment analysis. Getting an accurate estimate of the audience’s reaction to your marketing campaign will help you in designing a more effective campaign in the future.
For businesses like Retail stores and Restaurants that come in direct contact with their customers, the sentiment of the customer is of critical importance as it has the potential to make or break the business. Sentiment analysis helps them in analyzing the sentiment and making sure that the customer sentiment towards their business remains positive. As happy customers will give positive reviews about the place on the internet, leading to good publicity, which eventually leads to an increase in revenue.
If the customer sentiment is not favorable, then you can take corrective measures faster, and turn the tide into your favor.
Conclusion
Big Data analytics has proven its might as a useful tool in the business world. With more and more companies benefitting from it, Big Data analytics is here to stay. Using ‘SALES’, you can ensure that your business gains the maximum benefit from the use of Big Data Analytics.
