The Role of Big Data in Personalised Service
Jessica Furseth looks at how companies are using big data to get personal with their customers…
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme,” Mark Twain once said. The author might not have known it at the time, but he just described the reasoning behind big data and predictive analytics.
Predictive analytics is the process of taking large amounts of data from the present and past and analyzing it to find patterns that give insights about the future. It’s being used by increasing numbers of companies to help them understand where market trends are heading and what customers are looking for, helping them manage risk and take advantage of opportunities.
Eighty five percent of organisations using predictive analytics see it as having a positive impact, according to a survey by software giant SAP. A further 77 percent think it’s a tool to help them gain an edge over competitors. This is, in part, because analytics are enabling companies to provide personalised offers to customers.
“This next era of computing will be highly dependent on the personalisation of services and products, said Crawford Del Prete, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Research at analytics group IDC. Del Prete believes this era will be built on a platform of big data, analytics, mobile and social. Incidentally, he also believes that all of this will be backed up by the cloud – as cloud computing technology gets even more powerful, predictive analytics will too, because companies will be able to scale up their resources much faster than in the past.
Three companies that are already excelling in using big data (and the cloud) to deliver personalised service are listed below…
Using data from all around the world, Factual aims to personalise experiences and help companies such as Yelp! and Bing improve their mobile content. Retail start-up Shopular uses data from Factual to work out where their customers are, so they can be targeted with relevant deals.
“People expect not just an answer but the right answer. They expect it to be personalised based on who they are, what they’re thinking at that moment in time, and what they want,” Factual CEO Gil Elbaz told ‘VentureBeat’.
Medio Systems churns data through its cloud-based analytics engine to produce predictions on what people will do next, enabling companies to offer personalised services. Earlier in June, HERE, the navigation and mapping unit belonging to telecoms group Nokia, announced plans to buy Medio Systems, with the intent to create contextual and personalised mapping services. This could also be used for things like delivering local restaurant recommendations, and providing route options based on driving styles.
“We are entering the age of what I call cognitive mapping, in which maps will understand their environment and anticipate people’s intent in order to deliver interactive and smart location experiences,” said HERE CEO Michael Halbherr.
ExpertLabs-application MindMeld has nothing to do with Star Trek – this is an “anticipatory computing engine”. It can run in the background of meetings to pick up cues from what is being discussed, pulling up relevant information before users have to ask. This could become a vital time-saving tool, as so-called knowledge workers spend 19 percent of their average workday searching for and gathering information, according to McKinsey Global Institute. And if the software brings up information that contradicts the assumptions of the group, MindMeld could even change the outcome of a discussion.
“Spurred by recent advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence, context-aware intelligent assistants represent the new frontier of content search and discovery,” said CEO and founder of Expect Labs, Timothy Tuttle.