Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
business, which can lead to enhanced productivity, a stronger competitive position,
and greater innovation—all of which can have a significant impact on the bottom line.
For example, collecting sensor data through in-home health-care monitoring devices can
help analyze patients' health and vital statistics proactively. This is especially critical in case
of elderly patients. Health-care companies and medical insurance companies can then make
time interventions to save lives or prevent expenses by reducing hospital admissions costs.
The proliferation of smart phones and other GPS devices offers advertisers an
opportunity to target consumers when they are in close proximity to a store, a coffee
shop, or a restaurant. This opens up new revenue for service providers and offers many
businesses a chance to target new customers.
Retailers usually know who buys their products. Use of social media networks and
web-log files from their e-commerce sites can help them understand who didn't buy and
why they chose not to. This can enable much more effective micro customer segmentation
and targeted marketing campaigns, as well as improve supply chain efficiencies.
Companies can now use sophisticated metrics to better understand their
customers. To better manage and analyze customer information, companies can create
a single source for all customer interactions and transactions. Forrester believes that
organizations can maximize the value of social technologies by taking a 720-degree view
of their customers instead of the previous 360-degree view. In the telecom industry,
applying predictive models to manage customer churn has long been known as a
significant innovation; however, today the telecom companies are exploring new data
sources like customers' social profiles to further understand customer behavior and
perform micro-segmentations of their customer base. Companies must manage and
analyze their customers' profiles to better understand their interactions with their
networks of friends, family, peers, and partners. For example, using social relationships
the company can further analyze whether customer attrition from their customer base
is also influencing similar behavior from a host of other customers who have social
connections with the same customer. By doing this kind of linkage analysis companies
can better target their retention campaigns and increase their revenue and profit.
■
What the “720-degree customer view” involves is compiling a more comprehensive
(some might say “intrusive”) portrait of the customers. in addition to the traditional 360-de-
gree view of the customer's external behavior with the world (i.e., their buying, consuming,
influencing, churning, and other observable behaviors), you add an extra 360 degrees of
internal behavior (i.e, their experiences, propensities, sentiments, attitudes, etc.) culled from
behavioral data sources and/or inferred through sophisticated analytics. (source:
Targeted
Marketing: When Does Cool Cross Over to Creepy?
James Kobielus October 30, 2012.)
Note
Taming the “Big Data”
Big data promises to be transformative. With technology advances, companies now have
access to effectively deal with large amounts of data and data from various sources. If this
data is put to effective usage, companies can deliver substantial top- and bottom-line
