Anticipating consumer demand and customer experience sounds like something from the dark arts or something on what huge tech conglomerates spend billions to preserve their competitive advantage. However can this Big Data phenomenon be applicable to businesses that are small and do not invest in witch craft?

Business data has been around since there was business from handwritten ledgers and floppy disks to spreadsheets and databases. Relying on the Microsoft SQL reports is still a given for some small businesses. Until now, our technologies were limited in their capabilities to organize and analyze the data that the businesses collected, and only a handful of tech giants could afford it.

Today when data is carefully mined, cross-referenced, and analysed, every company that collects even the smallest amount of user information can reap the benefits of Big Data.

Big Data helps businesses get a grip on the data that matters most

It is time to go Big Data

With the right tools, Big Data helps businesses get to grips on the data that matters the most and turn that information into a million customer scenarios, regardless of the company size. Just three examples of how Big Data solves real issues:

Anticipating customer behavior. Analyzing how customers make decisions helps the businesses make better decisions of their own. Netflix famously builds predictive models based on their viewership data. But even smaller businesses like real estate management companies use Big Data to analyze a multitude of variables and how customers percept them: weather, market conditions, seasonal trends, size and location of the property. They use for it to pinpoint the best price recommendations down to weeks and days.

Maintenance Optimization. Cross-referencing essential information about the equipment – year, make, model, sensor data, log entries, errors, and even temperatures, lets the businesses model and predict possible hardware failures and schedule maintenance accordingly. It allows cutting maintenance costs and raises the reliability of the business.

Battling fraud. Hackers and fraudsters are no longer an established caricature of themselves i.e. a bunch of kids wearing hoodies. They can be teams of professionals who are after your data. Yet, with Big Data and machine learning, it is significantly easier to predict any vulnerabilities and threats. Big Data also helps save on security costs and reputational damages.

Overcoming the challenges

Like anything, Big Data is not a one stop solution for everything and in fact presents its own challenges. Big data requires storage preferably on the cloud. Also Big Data requires a toolset that would collect, store, and report on data that is necessary for each business model and operating style. Such solutions require experienced developers and managers who, like Tentacle Solutions, would provide handcrafted Big Data solutions and analytics for each of their clients, no matter how big or small they are.