by Angela Guess
Tracey Mustacchio of B2C recently explained how deeper customer engagement is contributing to the value of Big Data. Mustacchio writes, “Once upon a time, engagements with customers were relatively small. If you sold someone telephone service, you sold them telephone service… Nowadays, if you’re selling someone telephone service, you’re probably trying to sell them Internet access and entertainment services as well. And those entertainment services may include everything from on-demand movies to multiple sports subscription packages. The fact is that engagements with customers are getting bigger. This is because: (1) Customers are an extremely valuable business asset—so businesses have learned that they can grow revenue and profits by selling more stuff to their existing customer base. (2) Customers are looking to deal with fewer vendors who know them better—and who can therefore deliver a better experience at a lower price—than a higher number of vendors who don’t know them very well at all.”
Mustacchio continues, “This helps explain why big data is becoming such a critical discipline today. Companies need a broader, deeper understanding of their customers, their markets and the wider world in which those customers and markets exist because both companies and customers desire broader, deeper engagements with each other. And this broader, deeper understanding is exactly what big data offers. IT leaders involved in the adoption of big data disciplines need to be especially clear on this point. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking that we need to capture and analyze big data simply ‘because it’s there.’ There is, after all, more data available to us than ever—from public sources, from social media, from device telemetry, etc. And somewhere in all that noise there are certainly signals that will be useful for our businesses.”
