No matter what industry your company is in – from pharmaceuticals to financial services – people are discussing Big Data and what it means for your business. Though the term has become fairly ubiquitous over the last decade, not everyone is working with the same definition. In the broadest sense, Big Data is analyzing extremely large and complex data sets comprised of structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. The patterns, interactions, and trends that emerge offer previously unavailable insights and areas of focus. One such insight is the 360-degree view of the customer.
All of the data touch points a customer has made with your business – social media activity, transaction information, and website interaction – coupled with the demographic, geographic, and household information, helps form this 360-degree view. A complete view is unattainable, yet the closer your business gets to this view, the better you can engage previous and potential customers with new products and services in a highly focused and personalized manner. To get close to this coveted 360-degree view of the customer, your business needs to employ customer data management software that is scalable, flexible, and configurable to your business’s needs and objectives.
Striving for a 360-Degree View of the Customer
The only way your business can drive personalized engagement is to understand each customer’s unique preferences, buying habits, and degree of interaction with your business across all platforms. At the foundation of the 360-degree view is structured data, such as machine readable purchase history and address information, and the more unwieldy unstructured data, such as social media posts, images, maps, videos, and audio files with no labeling or in a non-character format. Semi-structured data is more of a gray area but often data with metadata or tags but not a clearly defined schema (structure), which can change depending on the purpose, like XML or JSON documents.
Identifying, gathering, and analyzing all of the available data on an individual requires using some kind of customer data management software to process large data sets in real time in order to create both a current view of the customer and an over time, longitudinal view. An efficient and effective customer data management software platform should allow you to provide a unified, centralized location from which all customer data can be easily managed and shared. The 360-degree view of the customer can then be leveraged into distinctive marketing and engagement initiatives, such as previously unknown cross-selling opportunities and loyalty programs unique to each customer.
HiPER Empowers Identification and Marketing Efforts
The ability to process large, complex data sets is only limited by the processing power you have available. Black Oak Analytics employs High Performance Entity Resolution system (HiPER), which is used for deduplication, matching, and linking data records in a Hadoop framework. HiPER increases data quality and accuracy by processing data across clusters of powerful machines in Hadoop. HiPER allows your business to accurately process and analyze billions of records so you can more effectively identify and market to targeted audiences with greater efficiency.
If you would like to learn more about how to foster loyalty to your business by utilizing the 360-degree view of the customer, contact Black Oak Analytics today.