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How Big Data can Benefit Indian Businesses

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Anuj Sharma
New Update

Big data is a hot trend and there are companies already leveraging it. How do you see big data unfold in the coming days?

For those successful in tapping into Big Data, the potential upside is tremendous. However, across industries, the quest for accurate, actionable insights is fraught with challenges. While businesses tend to think first about systems and software, a lack of analytics expertise has been identified as a key factor in garnering Big Data value. That's one thing we foresee as one of the biggest challenges in business, apart from a big demand-supply gap in Big Data talent. Businesses striving for Big Data value will benefit by ensuring that they have the right staffing.

The use of big data will become a key basis of competition and growth for individual firms. From the standpoint of competitiveness and the potential capture of value, all companies need to take big data seriously. In most industries, established competitors and new entrants alike will leverage data-driven strategies to innovate, compete, and capture value from deep and up-to-real-time information.

What all business domains are likely to benefit from big data the big way and how?

According to a recent E&Y study, most Indian organizations are still in the early stages of understanding the scope of data they generate. The early adopters of Big Data are likely to emerge from experiential sectors such as BFSI, retail, hospitality and media for social collaboration-led solutions, while process automation driven sectors such as transportation, logistics and plant operations for machine or sensor-driven solutions are still understanding the market sentiment.

How is big data being used by companies across the world?

In one of our recent announcements, we signed up a deal with Twitter, the leading global real-time information network, to provide Location Intelligence solutions for their mobile platform. Twitter currently has more than 230 million users, and nearly 60 percent of their 500 million daily Tweets are sent from mobile devices. Just an example of how companies are leveraging the power of Big Data analytics in real time for a great customer experience.

Serving customers with their customized requirements is the need of the hour and big data holds promise here. What's your advice on how to do this?

Big Data has changed customer expectations forever. In order to gain a competitive edge, companies need to find new and better ways to improve the customer experience at all levels. Companies with the ability to analyze the repository of "Big Data" quickly and accurately to gain valuable information about customer needs, wants and behaviors-information they can use to make adjustments at all touch-points to optimize the overall customer experience. What follows is a look at some of the ways big data analysis platforms are helping companies improve customer service.

- Predictive analytics - More and more companies, particularly, are using predictive analytics as a retain their customers. Through big data analysis, companies can get a better handle on the types of service issues customers are experiencing most often and take the necessary steps to avoid problems and resolve issues

- Data silo leveling - The benefit of big data analytics is that it can essentially level or flatten the data silos that support each of the sales and marketing channels, resulting in a flow of real-time information that could alert customer service team of the customer's order issues and lead to a fast and full resolution of the problem as well as retention of customers

- Spam avoidance - Big data analytics helps companies avoid over-messaging customers by factoring previous offers and customer responses into their messaging campaigns.

- Tailored products and services - A Big data analytics can provide businesses with valuable insights into customer behaviors and preferences. That can be used to optimize the customer experience and result in greater long-term customer loyalty needs of individual

Several surveys reveal that many organizations have invested in Big Data in 2013. Are they really deriving benefits from those investments? Any stats, figures on what percent of businesses are actually getting benefits, because a chunk of those efforts are still at experimentation level?

Across industries, the quest for accurate, actionable insights is fraught with challenges. New powerful platforms, systems and software are emerging; but, organizational issues, including staffing and data-management shortfalls, are limiting the effectiveness of most Big Data efforts. In a recent Pitney Bowes Software survey, more than half of all respondents reported that people skills and resource shortages contribute to their Big Data challenges. Analysts agree: businesses must address these human resources challenges now-or watch them grow and further restrict value as the volume, velocity and variety of Big Data skyrockets. Today 80% of the data present in any enterprise is unstructured data and according to a study data is expected to grow substantially by 2020 to an increase of 35% What all possibilities do you see in a country like India with respect to

leveraging Big data?

According to a study done by EMC it was found that almost 91 per cent of Indian businesses reported that better uses of big data will lead to better decision making. However, it is important to take into consideration that India is a progressive economy and has its limitations. Having said that, the momentum and understanding of big data is increasing rapidly, various types of businesses are increasingly seeing transformative benefits of using analytics to enable better resource management, gain competitive and market insights. In summary, there are immense possibilities of using Big Data to transform the way we live, think and make decisions. India has the talent, the ecosystem of service providers and a rising base of technology-savvy users with mobile and social connections. As global examples have shown us, even smartphones can be used to collect data in Big Data analytics initiatives. All we require is the will and the commitment to use data for transforming governance.

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