Companies depend on data to respond to evolving needs, improve customer relationships, and reduce the risks that threaten business operations. Through big data analytics, organizations can predict emerging trends and discover valuable insights that help them make strategic decisions.
That said, one of the biggest benefits of the effective use of data for organizations is its ability to help reduce costs. From marketing strategies to customer service, properly leveraging analytics and swaths of data can help organizations glean better insights to cut down on operational costs and increase revenue.
Target Ad Campaigns for Fewer Wasted Marketing Dollars
Data has always been an invaluable part of effective marketing. It’s helped businesses move away from mass-marketing campaigns to focus on more targeted and personalized strategies. Capturing data from every customer touchpoint can offer a better understanding of both customer behavior and intent. Then, companies can create strategic marketing plans that target a particular cohort—for example, personalized recommendations based on previous purchases or social media activity.
In the case of performance marketing, advertising costs are billed when a targeted online user performs a certain action, such as clicking on a paid advertisement. Using big data analytics, they can identify the variables that are most likely to influence a customer’s click. When advertising is more relevant and less expensive to carry out, fewer marketing dollars are wasted.
Clearly, the two are direectly linked. A Forrester study found that 37% of marketers waste budget unnecessarily because of poor quality data. Accurate, up-to-date data can help companies identify the channels that are more likely to lead to conversions, allowing them to deploy their campaigns and marketing dollars more strategically.
Avoid Financial Impact of Supply Chain Disruptions
According to data compiled by IBM, 84% of chief supply chain officers (CSCOs) report that a lack of supply chain visibility is the biggest challenge they face. Consider how much data supply chains generate: internal historical sales data, supplier performance records, point of sale consumer data, and landed cost data. Through supply chain digitization, companies can get end-to-end visibility to better identify problem patterns, bottlenecks, and other opportunities to reduce costs. The result: improved efficiency, fewer disruptions, and competitive edge in their markets.
Related Reading: 5 Ways to Optimize Supply Chains with Analytics
In supply chain management, decisions often need to be made quickly and can have a significant financial impact—sometimes in the millions of dollars. With a digitized supply chain, organizations can quickly glean valuable insights from real-time status reports, resulting in faster decision-making, fewer service area gaps, and optimized connections with customers and suppliers.
Prevent Loss with Better Fraud Detection
Fraud can be costly for a business in any industry. Data and analytics can help organizations discover trends that point towards suspicious activity to reduce fraud and thwart criminal efforts.
For example, big data can help retailers build profiles and set thresholds for normal customer behavior regarding the purchase of a specific product over a period of time. With this baseline established, retailers can then identify customers whose behaviors indicate that they may be committing return fraud. Retailers can then blacklist these customers or take other actions to help prevent return fraud.
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Avoid Downtime and Missed SLAs with Enhanced Log Analytics
Log analytics can be a goldmine. Log events, audit trail records, and even simple logs can provide visibility across various systems. This data can then be used to understand user behavior, improve application or infrastructure performance issues, proactively mitigate risk, and ensure compliance with security policies, audits, and regulations. Log analysis can also help with resource management, enabling companies to better understand their current and future usage. Too few resources can cause poor performance, missed SLAs, and lost sales, while too many available resources can result in increased expenses.
By tracking system resource usage, businesses can detect where they need extra capacity for better performance. They can also identify underutilized assets that can be restructured to improve productivity, efficiency, and performance. DevOps and IT teams can react to issues faster, shortening the time needed to detect and resolve production problems. Log analysis can also identify issues before they occur, allowing teams to proactively address root causes before they cause downtime or other performance issues.
Make Better Customer Service Table Stakes
Poor customer service not only translates to lost sales, it can result in fewer lifetime customers. Research from Gladly found that 92% of consumers would stop purchasing from a company after three or fewer poor customer service experiences. Through the effective use of data from CRM systems, accurate customer profiles can reveal issues, enabling faster service and problem resolution. Data can also help identify weak areas in their customer service strategies to enhance the way they interact with customers.
With agile analytics, companies can also identify opportunities to keep current customers satisfied. In most cases, it costs more to win new customers than to nurture existing customers happy. Consolidated data from surveys, reviews, and other online and offline customer feedback mechanisms can help businesses create post-sales strategies that improve customer retention.
Drive Productivity and Efficiency with Real-time Data
When data and analytics are a bottleneck, teams and workflows can stall out. The availability of real-time data can play a vital role in the productivity and operational efficiency of an organization. Smarter reports can cut through the noise, helping managers, employees, and customer service reps pinpoint the exact information they need. Analytics can also increase productivity within teams, fine-tune recruiting and hiring methods, and improve management and training methods that drive employee satisfaction and performance.
Accelerate Big Data Analytics with Pure Storage®
Big data analytics hold a wealth of information that can help organizations direct financial resources more efficiently to optimize expenses and significantly reduce costs. Get more value from your data with a modern data infrastructure that can help you accelerate decision making, simplify operations, and power analytics. All-flash data storage solutions like Pure Storage FlashBlade® can help you leverage big data to make better, faster business decisions.
FlashBlade is the world’s leading unified fast file and object (UFFO) platform. This fast and efficient scale-out flash storage solution is perfectly suited for analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence workloads.
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