Business analytics and intelligence are in high demand as companies look to utilize information assets to better understand and grow their brands, expand customer relationships, and improve overall operational efficiency. However, it is now more challenging than ever to keep up with the ever-changing expectations and demands of a growing analytics community. Users desire more control, faster development cycle times, and better analysis and visualization capabilities.
Organizations are watching emerging trends to find the next great competitive advantage of using data. The easiest trend to identify is having more information than the competition. Data volumes continue to grow at a rapid rate with organizations tapping new sources created by online customer behavior and social media. To keep pace with the marketplace, it is critical to understand how your business can use emerging trends in analytics to find actionable insights to better understand and grow your brands.
How to Use Emerging Trends
While trends are emerging in the analytics field daily, the following are a few important emerging trends and how companies are using them for competitive advantage:
Big Data from Social Media Motivates Customer Analytics Innovation
Consumer data intelligence has been a major driver of growth for prediction and pattern recognition for many years. During the brick-and-mortar store days, companies want to analyze and interpret transactional data against demographic information. Advanced organizations took this a step further and mine the data to reveal product affinities and buying patterns. Once call centers and e-commerce took hold, companies had to expand this analysis to include interaction data across all channels, thus bringing in terabytes of new information.
With the emergence of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms, customers are now using social networks as a method to influence others through word-of-mouth advertising while expressing their personal experiences and shopping interests. Organizations are chomping at the bit to capture and study this type of social media activity from current and potential customers on social media networks.
Therefore, by analyzing the big data derived from social media activity, you will have a competitive advantage over those who do not utilize this resource. Major companies like LinkedIn, Yahoo!, and eBay are analyzing this data regularly to influence the content placement and feature development.
Decision Management Allows Organizations to be Predictive
The most innovative organizations across all industries are utilizing automated information technology to reduce delays in their response to customer interactions, prevent fraud, react to supply chain changes, and much more. The goal is to operate a business as close to real-time as possible which gives companies the advantage of fast and excellent customer service. Part of reaching the operating in real-time goal is to utilize information analysis to become more predictive and proactive toward customers. This allows businesses to be fully prepared when predicted events occur.
Text Analytics Help Firms Interpret Social Media Trends
With the continued interest in social media analysis, there is a new spotlight on text analytics which is a crucial technology for understanding “sentiment” on social media platforms and customer reviews. Like data mining, the text mining and analytics category vary to include a variety of software and techniques like relationship extraction, natural language processing, predictive analysis, and visualization.
Text analytics has proven to give companies an advantage by understanding the sentiments expressed by customers while interacting with call centers. May organizations record voice of the customer (VOC) comments in customer and call surveys due to a lack of tools but cannot analyze and share them with regularity. On the other hand, social networks allow customers to exchange information in a relaxed and natural setting that is chock full of clues regarding the failure or success of a product. For example, in healthcare, text analytics help companies monitor social networks to better understand what patients are experiencing when taking specific drugs or during treatments.
About NetBase Quid
NetBase Quid is a consumer and marketing intelligence platform that helps companies better interact with customers, deliver business insights to reveal trends and patterns, and understand the competitors within the market. NetBase Quid offers a variety of services ranging from brad health and perception to campaign strategy, trend analytics, and product innovation ad launch.
