5 Practical Ways Your Business Can Use Big Data Now

What can big data do for you? Is it worth taking on the challenges of Hadoop, NoSQL databases, Hive, Python, and/or Docker? The answer is yes: big data can improve your revenue, lower your costs, and even help you hire and retain the best employees. Here is a look at the most practical ways that businesses are leveraging big data today.

1. Improve Production and Operations

What if you could streamline your operations and improve your production capabilities? By using the historical data on your production and operations, big data analytics can identify bottlenecks, show you where materials and efforts are going to waste, and help you better these processes for improvements in timely deliveries, waste reduction, automation, labor use, and much more.

2. Personalize Your Customers’ Experiences With Your Brand

When your customers call your technical support, customer service, sales, billing, or other departments, do they get personalized service from agents who act like they know your customers personally? When customers shop your website, are they shown products that they are most likely to be interested in? This is the type of personalization of the customer experience you can get using big data.

3. Detecting and Thwarting Fraud and Other Nefarious Activities

Big data analytics can also be sued to detect a network intrusion or someone attempting to defraud your business. By examining current network and system activities with historical data on previous threats and fraudulent activities, data analytics can alert your security team, loss and prevention staff, or IT service desk when suspicious activity occurs so that you can stop it before it’s too late.

4. Helping You Select and Provide the Best Employee Benefits

Depending on the industry you are in, the region in which you operate, and other factors, your employees might need different types of health insurance, life insurance, sick days, and other benefits packages. Big data can help you select the ideal package for your workers. For instance, data analytics could indicate that your workers need great parental leave policies but don’t need as much as usual for prescription drug coverage. This knowledge allows you to negotiate the best possible benefits packages for your workers, which translates directly into higher employee morale, lower turnover rates, lower training rates, and more.

Another side to this is that big data can identify where the most accidents occur or what leads to more employee illnesses. This data can help you fine tune your safety policies to improve worker health, lower workers’ compensation insurance premiums, reduce the need for temporary staffing during employee recoveries following accidents, and more.

5. Improving Your Business’ Outlook for the Future

What are the future pricing trends? What does the data indicate about supply chain fluctuations? What products will be in the greatest demand heading into next year, or the next five years? Big data can be used to conduct predictive analysis, which means that the data doesn’t just help you create a better now, it also solidifies a better future for your business.

Isn’t it time your business began to benefit from a big data initiative?