The age of Big Data is finally here, holding promises for a better world with better understanding and services for the customers. If you are anywhere related to IT, you must be aware of the broadness of the term “Big Data”. It is described as a large data set which is further mined and analysed to find patterns and behavioural trends.

The term “customer” is itself a vast term covering a wide surface area across various verticals and industries. In general we consider the actual meaning of customer in retail context but a patient in a hospital is also a customer. Similarly, a patron of a bank or some other business is also acknowledged as customer. Definitely, the needs of customers across all these scenarios vary greatly and that’s the reason there is no focal solution which is able to adhere the needs of customers across these different marketing enterprises.

To induce data fuel marketing, businesses are gradually modernising their data management strategies. They are introducing many internal directives to transform their marketing and customer retention patterns through data. Indeed this is not done overnight but in the realm of Big Data there are already several patterns that a company can adopt to meet their goal of being data-driven.

Being a marketing professional, you understand the vitality of data that help you to better target marketing activities. You accept the fact that more data is always better to understand the market in which you practice. But being data-driven is not an easy transition. Even studies say that there are 85% of companies who are trying to be data-driven but only 37% of them are successful.

So what’s the sense behind this entire data-drive psychology?

Advanced analytics is always considered as the end aspiration for this.

Management of this Big Data is a big concern now. The concept of identity exists as marketers can transform these huge data sets into a form that represent their current and potential customers; hence can provide valuable and actionable insights.

But from where one should begin?

Understanding your customers!

Accumulating customer data should be the very first step to gain an enhanced profile of your customer. The most common problem among businesses is that their customer data is stored in different data silos. This environment doesn’t provide a clear picture of a customer’s preferences thus conflicting the goal of providing a better customer experience.

With a cIAM platform, these data silos can be eliminated, data is centralized and companies can get a better view of their entire customer base. A cIAM platform aims to be the source of unified persona that can help businesses decide a future strategy to serve their customers better. It makes use of progressive profiling to attain customer information in bits and pieces rather than all at once.

Prediction of customer behaviour can yield impressive opportunities to boost your company’s revenue. Since insights are useless if they’re not actionable, companies should use these insights achieved from Big Data to provide contextualised, personalised and relevant experience to your customers.

Wrapping it up!

Every company has it’s own unique journey and different sets of use cases. However becoming data driven is not an overnight game but the treasure of customer data is there for you to harness.  Today customers are participating in hundreds of activities that create data. Hence  leverage this customer data by modernising your systems and processes and give your business a competitive edge.

Guest blog post by Prince Kapoor (Digital Marketing Manager and Recruiter), please  if you have any questions about the contents of this post.

Published 26 July 2017