As anyone who has shopped at one of the major global online retailers knows, buying patterns are carefully monitored by the site.
What users buy, what products they browse – sometimes even how they navigate through a single page – all is recorded and fed into an analysis engine that aims to make the experience better, often by serving up other recommended products or giving buyers special offers based on purchase history.
Browse a site offering Internet services for long enough and a chat window will pop up with a real person on the other end with whom consumers can chat.
“The modern e-commerce experience is a finely-tuned example of how Big data can be used to personalise customer experience,” says Richard Firth, serial entrepreneur and CEO of MIP Holdings.
“A large retailer like Amazon can generate millions of log files per day which it continuously analyses real-time for customer behaviour. Log files may sound boring but they’re actually gold mines of useful information: here is data that can help us understand what a customer is doing.
“And it’s all realtime or near realtime. For the first time, we are analysing all this new information and the goal is to target services to the consumer, with a better chance of getting it right.”
As well as personalising the Web experience, realtime analytics also means that retailers can also keep a very tight rein on their costs and stock controls, says Firth. But comparatively few businesses are online retailers: how does the ordinary organisation leverage these tools?
“Companies need to return to their selling mechanisms,” says Firth. “Social media and big data gives them the means to understand the target market. Big data gives everyone the means to personalise service if they’re creative enough and can find sources of useful big data with which to analyse and then feed back into their existing customer relationships.”
He points out that in the US, even small businesses are getting in on the act, and all without spending millions on infrastructure and capability.
“Forbes reports that even outlets with two or three branches are using big data analytics to provide the kind of personalised service that was once only the domain of the small town corner shop. They can optimise supply chains, get instant overviews of customer behaviour and loyalty and keep an eye on employee performance.
“These small businesses aren’t using multi-million dollar Hadoop and analytics machines but streamlined custom applications in the cloud.”
Firth says the organisation that can gather information from mobile technologies and social media effectively and then find a way of processing it cost-effectively to get insight will be strongly positioned.
“In the end you need to ask how you can turn insights from big data into actionable business intelligence,” he concludes.
